Myson Midas
the golden touch: technology, poetry and the small gods of chaos

Graham Mort

Writers who have impressed and inspired me

The first book to make a significant impression on me was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I read it 7 times in Junior School! I read it again recently and it still made the hairs on my neck tingle. The next insight came through Lord of the Flies by William Golding – for the first time I realised that a story could work on more than one level, that a writer could say something through their story. Mark Twain’s Puddin’ Head Wilson reinforced that notion. Then Sons & Lovers became a huge influence. Here, I found an author writing about a working class family that I recognised, but also writing with wonderful understanding and sensory exactness.

One day, when I was about 15, I walked into my house on a summer’s evening to hear a voice on the radio say: ‘The pig lay on the barrow, dead.’ The voice has a strong northern English accent, but the text was unmistakably a poem - Ted Hughes’ View of a Pig. It was a step along the road to Damascus: people like me not only read, but wrote poems. I bought all Ted Hughe’s books and realised that he in turn had been influenced by Lawrence’s poems. Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin all came in a tumble and I became an omnivorous reader in both poetry and prose.

Other early revelations came through the novels of James Joyce, William Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf; the stories of Catherine Mansfield and Liam O’Flaherty, the work of Gaelic poet, Sorley Maclean, the old English epic Beowulf. The first pivotal African text was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart – still a great book. In the past year several books set in Africa or by Africans have impressed me: Amos Tutuola’s beguiling book The Palm Wine Drinkard, Moses Issegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, Tsitsi Dangerembga’s Nervous Conditions and Giles Courtmanche’s harrowing but beautiful, A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali. I also read books on a wide variety of subjects from history to science, genetics to consciousness, cookery to cricket, literatuere to current affairs. Somehow, it all finds its way into my writing in the end!