Writers

This is difficult to discuss as your influence and your favourite writers change all the time – and they should change all the time. Early on, for me, it was R S Thomas as a poet. I studied him for A-level so as such he was the first poet where I studied his entire work and his life. I was drawn both to his work but also the contradictions in him and his life.

Whatever cross-section of books I choose from the hundreds that have inspired me, something critical will be overlooked. However, here is a random list as it occurs to me on a Friday morning in October. Early on, anything by Ray Bradbury: I cut my teeth on him, and the first short stories I began banging out on my mother’s Underwood typewriter from the age of nine were all science fiction.

Books That Have Inspired Me:

• Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear.
  All of my earlier novels were pale imitations of either Graham Greene or Patrick Hamilton. They are the writers I go back to time and time again. Any book by either of them is worth reading.

Books That Have Inspired Me:

In my youth, my favourite writers were William Burroughs, Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, but my own subsequent writing–as far as I can tell–shows no sign of their influence. I suspect that they appealed precisely because they were so utterly weird and wonderful that they precluded any attempts at emulation. Your only realistic aspiration is to try to honour their originality through the gradual discovery and development of your own. Bill, Ron and Ivy would have agreed, I’m sure, that the only point in writing is to “make it new”.

Jim Crace was born in Hertfordshire in 1946. He read English Literature at London University and worked for VSO in Sudan as an assistant in Sudanese educational television. He began writing fiction in 1974 and his first story, Annie, California Plates, was published by the New Review. He became Writer in Residence at the Midlands Arts Centre and in 1983 he directed the first Birmingham Festival of Readers and Writers.

The writers who inspired me at the outset (when I was 16) were D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. I still read them, with great profit and pleasure – Lawrence most recently and especially, for the short stories. At present I’m reading A Proper Marriage, which is the second volume of Doris Lessing’s novel-sequence The Children of Violence. Also the poems of Bertolt Brecht, to translate him, and those of George Herbert, to write a note on him for the Reader magazine. I read Seamus Heaney again as soon as I heard of his death.

Two books that inspired me while writing The Testament of Jessie Lamb are Philip Roth’s great American Pastoral – the untold story, the story the Swede will never know, his daughter’s story and why she became a terrorist – that story set me thinking about fathers and daughters, and daughters who act against their fathers’ wishes; and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, a pure young voice in a terrifying future.

DBC Pierre won the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread First Novel Award for his debut, Vernon God Little. His latest book, Petit Mal has been described as allegories of youth, wrongness & right – it is a collection of short fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and artwork in fits and starts that describe the moving targets of the modern and the real. He lives in County Leitrim, Ireland.

Three Books That Have Inspired Me:

1. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
   Sumptuous prose and dark humour pull me back repeatedly to this grotesque fantasy.

What I’m reading:

I’ve just finished writing my first ‘noir’ story, a commission from Akashic Press, which will be publishing an anthology of ‘Belfast Noir’ next year. I’ve never written ‘noir’ before, and I loved it. While I was planning my story, I was recommended the books of Megan Abbott: Dare Me and The End of Everything, both of which are about intense teenage friendships, forbidden crushes, and dark sexuality.

A few of Alison’s recent favourites:

• Flannery O’Conner – Complete Stories
• Tony Parker – Lighthouse

Dave Lordan is a writer, editor and creative writing workshop leader based in Dublin who has been shaking up the Irish writing scene with his passionate, risk-taking writing since the early noughties. He is the first writer to win Ireland’s three national prizes for young poets, the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2005, the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award in 2008 and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2011 for his collections The Boy in The Ring and Invitation to a Sacrifice, both published by Salmon. In 2010 Mary McEvoy starred in his debut play Jo Bangles at the Mill Theatre, directed by Caroline Fitzgerald. Wurm Press published his acclaimed short fiction debut First Book of Frags in 2013. Also in 2013, in association with RTÉ Arena and New Island Books, he designed and led Ireland’s first ever on-air creative writing course. Alongside Karl Parkinson he makes up the popular performance poetry duo Droppin The Act and he is a renownedly passionate performer of his own work.
Lordan has read and led workshops at numerous venues and festivals throughout Ireland, the UK, Europe and North America. He is a contributing editor for The Stinging Fly and he teaches contemporary poetry and critical theory on the MA in Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute of DCU.