The poet and author on F Scott Fitzgerald’s perfect novel, losing faith in Ernest Hemingway – and the recent debut that blew her away
My earliest reading memory
Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy – where an assortment of differently shaped dogs go on a walk – wormed its way into my subconscious when I was very young. The great dane (Hercules Morse, as big as a horse), the dalmatian (Bottomley Potts, covered in spots), the dachshund (Schnitzel Von Krumm with a very low tum) … I could probably still recite most of it from memory.
My favourite book growing up
I had a lot of picture books illustrated by the great Korky Paul, and remember being obsessed – even as quite a young child – with the intricate grotesquerie of it all. He’s probably best known these days for illustrating the Winnie the Witch books, but my favourite was The Rascally Cake by Jeanne Willis, in which a rotund, green-haired man called Rufus Skumskins O’Parsley makes a cake out of disgusting things (rotten eggs, spider legs, garden snails and so on), only for the cake to come to life and attempt to eat him. Probably more than a little bit of Skumskins found its way into the protagonist of my second novel, The Glutton.
