MY LIFE IN BOOKS: SARAH CROSSAN
Sarah Crossan has won many international awards for her verse novels, including the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the CBI Book of the Year award and was the fifth Laureate na nÓg from 2018–2020. Where the Heart Should Be, a novel for teenagers set during the Great Famine and for grown-ups,
Hey, Zoey, a darkly funny novel that explores the painful truths of modern-day connection, have both been recently published by Bloomsbury.
The books on your bedside table?
The novel that is alternately on my bedside and in my handbag is The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay which was written in the 1950s and was recommended to me by my local bookseller. It’s fantastic. I also always have a collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry by my bed. And a notebook.
Your book of the year so far?
I was captivated by Elaine Feeney’s most recent poetry collection, All The Good Things You Deserve. It opens like a verse novel, so it’s incredibly accessible and I found it painfully relatable.
Your favourite literary character?
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
The first book you remember? My English teacher guided us through Paul Zindel’s The Pigman when I was 13. It was the first novel to make me cry.
A book that changed your life? Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. It was a book which was handed to me by a colleague when I was working at a school in New Jersey. She recommended I try teaching it to my sixth graders. It’s in verse and my instinct was to set it aside, not believing poetry could motivate my somewhat lethargic students. But I took her advice, and the students’ overwhelmingly positive reactions to the book led me to write my own verse novels for children. Having been seen as a hard sell by the publishing industry early on, the form is now well established in the UK and Ireland.
The book you couldn’t finish?
I have no rules about persevering with books that fail to speak to me, so I own an incredibly tall pile of unfinished novels.
Your comfort read?
In terms of novels it’s either Jane Eyre or The Catcher in the Rye .I also come back to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart again and again. For poetry I reach for an anthology by Garrison Keillor called Good Poems or Collected Poems by Seamus Heaney.
The book you give as a gift? Depends on the recipient. For toddlers you can’t go wrong with a Chris Haughton book.
For young readers I usually give something by Sophy Henn (her latest, Happy Hills, is a riot), and for older children Jenny McLachlan’s always a good bet. Teens get a verse novel, usually something by Kwame Alexander. Right now I’m pressing Western Lane by Chetna Maroo into as many friends’ hands as I can. It’s spectacular. Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy I’ve been gifting to every mother I know. Worth the 10-year wait since her last book.
The writer who shaped you?
I came across Jeanette Winterson’s work at 17. Her clean prose that combines history with magical realism and narratives that tumble and pitch made me realise there could be a versatility and abstractness to storytelling. I had been accepted onto an undergraduate degree in philosophy but by the time I arrived at Warwick University I was more interested in fiction so I went to see Jeremy Treglown, at the time the head of English there, who kindly let me switch to the philosophy and literature degree. This changed the shape of my life.