The Swans

Sara Maitland

Writers who have impressed and inspired me

Probably the single book which has influenced my writing most is the Bible – in the 17th century “King James translation.” It has lots of great stories, which are about more than they look as though they were and it has a great richness of language, especially in its grammar (Who says you can’t begin a sentence with “And.” Who says repetition should be avoided?) and its rhythm.

I had a very good but very old fashioned education. We were read to a lot from the classic – Victorian – novels; and from fairy stories, myths and history. Again there was a strongly oral element in my early memories of books, although we were also encouraged to read for ourselves and given free access to my parents books. Somewhere in my teens I discovered Moby Dick (probably my very favourite novel of all time) – and from there other “non-realist” writing of different kinds – Dostoyevski, Marquez, Borges, Patrick White. But this is retrospective: as a school girl I simply - read, voluminously, addictively, indiscriminately (Tolstoy one minute – the instructions on the household bleach bottle the next!)

When I was an undergraduate I discovered Angela Carter, Ngugi, George Lamming – writers who were using myth and history and dream to undermine the social realism of the bourgeois novel. They were creating new ways of imagining the world and were doing it through a highly poetic (rather than prosaic) use of language and metaphor. That was what I wanted. Exactly like the Bible when you come to think about it.