Writers who have inspired me

The first book to make a significant impression on me was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I read it seven 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 Hughes' 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, literature to current affairs. Somehow, it all finds its way into my writing in the end!

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