Joelle Taylor: I picked up The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in a swoon of nine-year-old despair'

"My earliest reading memory I was around five when my mum first pulled out Clement C Moore's The Night Before Christmas, a bumper blue book with vivid illustrations. There was such suspense in the poem, such inexorable music, the sonic possibilities matching the mystery. My favourite book growing up The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. I used to spend every spare moment in Bacup library, Lancashire, bag of sweets to the right and a book open before me."

"I had read all of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven books, thought Famous Five were all a bit dry, and picked up Weirdstone in a swoon of nine-year-old despair. The darkness was delicious, exciting because many of the landmarks in the story were from my local area. The book that changed me as a teenager I was the first of my family to attend university, where I was introduced to books by black female writers for the first time."

Early reading began at age five with Clement C. Moore's The Night Before Christmas, remembered for vivid illustrations and musical suspense. Favourite childhood book was The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, read obsessively in Bacup library. Weirdstone's local landmarks intensified its darkness. University introduced books by black female writers; For Colored Girls... by Ntozake Shange influenced creative voice through its fusion of narrative, poetry and choreography. Fanzines like Shocking Pink and Spare Rib shifted perspectives. Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language demonstrated how to pursue literary work. A later return to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land revealed cinematic immediacy. Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue was reread for etymology and was shoplifted in the late 1980s.

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