My earliest reading memory
My parents were country people who thought that looking after or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say that he’d read half a book in his life (The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes), and while my mother got through three or four novels a year, she didn’t expect me to do anything equivalent. But I do remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I must have been seven or so, and thought it was amusing and ingenious.The books that changed me as a teenager
At my first school, I somehow got my hands on White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell, which my parents thought was unsuitably violent. I never finished it, but enjoyed carrying it around as proof of how grown-up I was. Then, at my secondary school, my history teacher read us some Wilfred Owen (we were studying the first world war), and the poetry-lights in my mind immediately flickered on. When I subsequently bought Owen’s Collected Poems it became a kind of sacred text for me (it still is).The book that made me want to be a writer
I’m not sure that I ever “wanted to be a writer” until I found that I was one: it had previously seemed too outlandish a possibility. But I did begin to tinker with poems of my own while I foraged through my excellent A-level poetry anthology: Theme and Variations, edited by RB Heath (1965). Despite its austerely unsexy title, this book made me feel like Carter breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb.The author I came back to
