My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the floor while our primary teacher, Mrs Craig, read to us about Odysseus and the blinded Cyclops. The story transported me to a hillside on an island in ancient Greece. I think that moment put the idea in my head that books, the best ones, were a kind of magic.

My favourite book growing up
In my teens I stopped reading, like lots of boys. My mum was the only bookish person in our family, almost everyone else was obsessed with our farm. My grandma scolded me one day for reading in daylight hours; she said there couldn’t possibly be so little to do on the farm that a boy should sit and read a book. She swept me out of her kitchen to find some work to do. And I felt ashamed that she thought I was idle.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 15, I left school and worked on our farm, and I began reading again. I read at night, because I couldn’t yet drive and there was nothing on TV. I was lucky that my mum had a bookcase of great books, left to her by her schoolteacher dad. I felt a bit of an alien in my own life at that time, as many young people do, and I found my best friends in those books. I was spending my evenings with Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, JD Salinger or Wilfred Owen (yes, it was quite a male sample, and I should have read my grandad’s copies of Iris Murdoch, but didn’t). I didn’t dare tell anyone about this reading, so I was a closet reader for years. But thanks to those books, I didn’t feel so alone.

The writer who changed my mind
I recently read Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond. It helped me understand how our economic system works, why it stays like that, and how many of us benefit from the existence of other people’s poverty.

The book that made me want to be a writer
A Shepherd’s Life by WH Hudson. It was a revelation because it was about people like my family. It’s a portrait of rural life and farming people in the mid-19th century in Wiltshire, as remembered by an old shepherd who reminded me of my grandfather. Reading it, I felt my world could legitimately be the stuff of books, and that’s powerful when you are 16. It took me 20 years to get from that teenage burst of self-belief and purpose to having a book published, but it did happen. It was an international bestseller called The Shepherd’s Life.

The author I came back to
One of my favourite books is Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard. But I find his other novels and short stories hard work. I keep trying to read them, because loads of talented writers admire and praise them, but it’s a bit of a slog.

The book I reread
If I had to live with just one book I might take the translated poems of Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet. She’s such an elegant and classy writer, dealing with some of the most horrific moments of the 20th century. There is a poem she wrote called Requiem, about those troubled times, that I think might be the best thing I’ve ever read.

The book I could never read again
I read a lot of Holocaust and gulag memoirs in my 20s. I think I wanted to understand what people could do to each other and what people could endure. And now I can’t read books like that – I have four kids and it’s all too real and heartbreaking.

The book I discovered later in life
I didn’t read any Wendell Berry until after I wrote my first book, which is really odd, because he is the greatest agrarian radical writer of our age. I love his essays (The World-Ending Fire) best, they are really clear-eyed and elegant, and grounded in his memories of rural Kentucky.

The book I am currently reading
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. A wonderful book that I’m reading for the third time. I am obsessed with Scandi literature. I feel like my cultural roots are to the north. I love The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer and the novels of Halldór Laxness: their obsession with kinship and deep-rooted belonging, and the kind of people that emerge from hardship in the north.

My comfort read
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. It is a wholesome fable about how an old French shepherd changes his landscape by planting oak trees, for many years, until he has seeded a forest. You can read it in about 10 minutes and yet it is jam-packed with wisdom.

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