Writers who have inspired me

I was bought up in a small North London flat with very few books, although my father was a passionate reader. The Public Library was our paradise. Every week we would each collect our four new volumes. Most of the books I continue to adore date from those years, and many of those had a natural history connection. I loved Jack London, for example, especially The Call of the Wild and his masterful short story 'To Light A Fire' and I still reread T.H.White’s wartime memoire, The Goshawk, despite my disapproval of training captive birds.

The books we did own were mostly political works and mostly novels, so I encountered Orwell, Steinbeck and passionate but lesser works like Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. My only encounter with the classics was while I was studying for my English Literature degree when I learned to love and value above all others the poets Coleridge and Robert Frost. My enduring favourites amongst the novels (possibly because they are so well structured) have been F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, George Elliot’s Middlemarch, and anything by Graham Greene (though, if you twisted my arm, I’d nominate The Quiet American, for its humanity and perception.).

Subsequently I have read less widely, but I still always devour new works by Margaret Atwood of Canada, Toni Morrison of the USA, and J.M.Coetzee of South Africa. If I could produce anything as imaginative as Calvino’s Invisible Cities or as important and plain-speaking as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, then I would count myself a happy writer.

But I have never made the claim that devouring books from dawn to dusk is the only worthwhile activity for a writer, let alone anybody else. 'Read, read, read' is not the advice I would give a young author. Books should not just be produced from other books. That would be like the snake chewing its own tail. No, if for example I am known as a landscape novelist, then that is not because I spend my time reading treatises on landscape – it is because I spend my weekends walking the hills and the coasts. And if I am described as a fabulist, then that’s not because I immerse myself in anthologies of folk tales but because I always have my ears peeled in pubs and streets and restaurants for the strange anecdote or the challenging expression that I can borrow -well, steal- for my stories. For some people, reading is the only gate to stimulation and contentment. But for others, cycling or angling or cooking or carpentry does the same trick. I have become one of these others. Reading has become less important for me. Now I take my pleasures more and more from music, gardening and friends.

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