Books that inspired your favourite authors

Why did your favourite writer become a writer? Why did they write that particular book that you love so much? Who inspired them, and what did they read while figuring out their own plot?

Many authors are asked by fans that age old question: ‘where do you get your inspiration?’ to which the reply is usually ‘reading, reading, and more reading’. when they’re not reading, they’re writing… Or procrastinating… But that is another blog.

Taken from interviews and articles over the years, the following list shows some of your favourite authors’ most treasured and inspirational books. Some may surprise you, and others may inspire you to write your own novel…

Hurricane

Zadie Smith (White Teeth) explained to The New York Times that the book that made her want to be a writer was a book written for young adults by Andrew Salkey called Hurricane:

“A Jamaican writer called Andrew Salkey… wrote a YA novel called Hurricane before YA was a term. I remember it as the book that made me want to write. He was the most wonderful writer for children. I just found what looks to be a sequel, Earthquake, on an old-books stall on West Third, and I intend to read it to my kids. He died in 1995.”

The Awakening

Sue Monk Kidd (The Mermaid Chair) spoke to The New York Times about her writing influences and cited Chopin’s groundbreaking 19th century novel about a woman’s fight for ‘moral and erotic freedom’ as a great inspiration:

“Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which I first read in college. The story of Edna Pontellier’s struggle with the limits her culture placed on women made a deep and lasting impression on me.”

Gone With The Wind

Canadian Living was given an interview with Jodi Picoult (A Spark of Light) to ask about her influences and inspirations:

“My favourite writer is Alice Hoffman; she’s brilliant. One of my favourite books in recent years was Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—I wished I’d written it, which is my highest form of compliment. The book that made me want to be a writer in the first place was Gone with the Wind—I read it and wanted to create a whole world out of words, too.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

David Sedaris (Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls) is a witty American humorist. He spoke to The New York Times about his writing life and told how his own writerly influences inspired his own style:

“I remember being floored by the first Raymond Carver collection I read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. His short, simple sentences and familiar-seeming characters made writing look, if not exactly easy, then at least possible. That book got me to work harder, but more important it opened the door to other contemporary short story writers like Tobias Wolff and Alice Munro.”

Earthsea

David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) had a few different influences as he was such a voracious reader, as he explained to The Paris Review. His first fiction love was Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy:

“There was no single epiphany, but I recall a few early flashes. When I was ten I would be transported by certain books—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Susan Cooper’s fantasy novels, Isaac Asimov—and burn to do to readers what had just been done to me. Sometimes that burning prompted me to start writing, though I never got more than a few pages down. A few years later I would indulge in a visual fantasy that involved imagining my name on the jacket of a book—usually Faber and Faber—and I’d feel a whoosh inside my rib cage.”

The Chronicles of Prydain

Chuck Wendig’s (Wanderers) insatiable appetite for reading led him to writing some of the most exciting novels of the 20th century:

“I remember reading the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander while sitting on the beach and being transported away from the sand and the sea to this fantastical place and I was so moved by moments within those mythic stories that I have since wanted to be a writer—a fierce need only increased by the great authors I read and love: Robin Hobb, Robert McCammon, Joe Lansdale, Bradley Denton—and since then I’ve been rejecting the beach and the sea and the sand and the sun to hide in my penmonkey cave ever since. (Which probably explains why I’m butt-white and pasty. But hey, I got colour in Australia! The kind of colour where my forehead looked like a boiled lobster and has been shedding its flesh for the last two days. CURSE YOU OZZIE DAYSTAR. This is why I stay inside and read books and stuff.)”

The Passion

Poetic prose writer Emma Donaghue (The Wonder) told The Guardian Newspaper of her writing influence that sparked a renewed love for exciting historical novels, and made her want to write:

“The book that made me want to write was The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. It made me feel that historical fiction didn’t have to be fusty and all about bodices, that it could be a thrilling novel, which just happened to be set in 1800.”

Napoleon

Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities) told the Paris Review of his very early influences as a budding young writer:

“I was greatly struck by Emil Ludwig’s biography of Napoleon, which is written in the historical present. It begins as the mother sits suckling her babe in a tent. … It impressed me so enormously that I began to write the biography of Napoleon myself, though heavily cribbed from Emil Ludwig. I was eight at the time.”

The Bluest Eye

Dorothy Allison (Trash) explains how her reading transports her:

“Reading books that you fall into, the essential thing that happens is it gives you permission. If you are a baby writer, it gives you permission to write stories as brave and large and engaging as the people who’s work you have fallen in love with or really touched your heart. If you’re not a writer, if you’re just a human being working deadly hours and it seems to me that I was always reading on breaks when I was a waitress and reading underneath the desk when I was a receptionist and reading to not be in the world that I was in and being invited into worlds that were so rich. That’s what I think novels do for you and that’s what reading novels did for me. It’s not that simple. They talk about us as if it’s simple, but it’s not that simple and that made me want to write novels in which the people were complicated. And it gives you permission. I don’t think I would have ever written Bastard if I hadn’t read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. In fact, I know I wouldn’t. It was like somebody cracked my world open when I read that book.”