MICHAEL MORPURGO

...are you reading now? I JUST re-read The Odyssey — the recent brilliant translation by Emily Wilson — while on Ithaca. I read it sitting on the very white pebbled shore on which Odysseus must have landed. Wonderful when both author and story are on the mysterious cusp of fact and fantasy. To read it there was extraordinary, surrounded by olive groves and sage-scented mountains, the goats crying like the ghosts of men and the gods looking down from the clouds, still trying to sort us out. Talked to Homer in his ruined palace and told him the ending of his great epic poem needed work. He agreed. Lovely fellow though. ...would you take to a desert island? TO REMIND me of our Devon home I would take James Ravilious’s book of glorious black-and-white photographs, The Heart Of The Country. It’s my corner of England, where clouds hang heavy over Dartmoor hills, where farmers live out their lives down deep lanes, where buzzards and larks share the sky, where herons and kingfishers fish the rivers, where sheep safely graze, where there is perfect peace. ...gave you the reading bug? COMICS, because I loved pictures to tell the stories. I read the Classics Illustrated series a lot, and The Dandy (below) and The Beano and The Eagle. Then in the school library I came across a copy of Treasure Island and loved it. I see the pictures in my head now. And my mother, I think, helped me more than anyone else to love stories and poems. She would read to us most nights, and read only those stories and poems she loved best. Our favourite was The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling. Wish I had written that! ... left you cold? I NEVER let a book leave me cold, not any more. If I am not enjoying a book, I simply don’t go on reading it. There were lots of books I was made to read at school, often when I was too young for them — or maybe I was studying them for exams. These books left me cold. It took me a while to learn to love reading for pleasure, to really lose myself in a book. So now, the moment I feel I am not enjoying a book, I close it and put it down and find one I really love. Important that — the freedom not to like a book, not to finish it.

MICHAEL MORPURGO is president of BookTrust, whose Time To Read campaign to give every child starting school in England a copy of Little Monkey by Marta Altes was launched this week (booktrust.org.uk).