For many of us, there’s a defining moment when the magic of reading first captured our hearts. Often, it’s a book from our formative years – a childhood tale that wrapped us up like a warm hug, or a story from our teenage years that altered our perspective, challenging us in a way that felt entirely new.

These moments of literary discovery shape us as readers – and sometimes as writers too. Here, the authors and translators nominated for the International Booker Prize 2025 share the books that sparked their love of reading and left such an impression, they still remember them today.

Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection

Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I read it over the course of a single day at 15 because it was referenced in a comic book – my only reading at the time. I remember feeling my pulse increasing while finishing The Cask of Amontillado and thinking that if literature could do this – this spooky action at a distance in time and space, this guiding of dreams – I wanted it to be the centre of my life. 

Sophie Hughes, translator of Perfection

Reading as a child was all pleasure. I loved Spike Milligan’s Silly Verse for Kids, and I have a strong memory of a now out-of-print picture book called Mr. Bill and the Runaway Sausages that made me laugh and laugh. In the copy I now read to my children, my sister and I have written and crossed out ‘This book belongs to…’ several times. I remember being delighted when books included characters called Sophie: The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The BFG, Dick King-Smith’s series Sophie Hits Six etc. Now I can see that this was an early expression of what, as a teenager, turned me on to the power of literature: reading poetry that seemed to have been written for me, that might not feature a Sophie, but absolutely spoke to my first intense experiences of falling in love, being dumped, travelling alone, being a Londoner etc. There was a lot of poetry in the house thanks to my mum, and now there is a lot in mine.  

Gaëlle Bélem, author of There’s a Monster Behind the Door

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. I fell in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. He is a man who compensates for the ugliness of his nose through the overdevelopment of his intellectual character. Cyrano de Bergerac, c’est moi! I love this book because, in very few pages, it tells a story of love and friendship while touching on all human tribulations – disillusionment, failure, estrangement, mockery, war, solitude, death. Books have this power to scan souls. And I love this book because it makes a complete audit of the human soul. I also love this book because it speaks of fragility. The fragility of a man, the fragility of love, and I think that Cyrano helps me to bear my own life better. 

Karen Fleetwood, translator of There’s a Monster Behind the Door

At the age of about eight, I was given the first book in the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. This series is about a girls’ school located first in Austria, then in Britain and finally in Switzerland. The girls are expected to learn to speak German, French and English fluently, and the books are scattered with phrases in both German and French. This series was my obsession well into my teenage years. It is the reason I developed a passion for languages and so has shaped my entire life.    

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, translator of There’s a Monster Behind the Door

I grew up in a modest household where there weren’t many books around. I remember studying passages from Les Misérables at school one day and loving it so much that I came back home with the book I had borrowed from the school library. I was fascinated by the character of Gavroche and the barricade scene which ends with this beautiful sentence: ‘Cette petite grande âme venait de s’envoler’ [‘This great little soul had flown away’].    

Saou Ichikawa, author of Hunchback

I loved Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington series and Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s series. Reading about Paddington getting upset about Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’, and rushing off to complain to the composer himself, instilled in me the determination to always finish every work that you start!    

Polly Barton, translator of Hunchback

The book that comes to mind is The Very Big Secret by Enid Blyton. It’s about a bunch of children who look after a baby in secret in the forest. As a child it seemed to me totally wondrous. I think that was the first time I was aware of this sense of fiction as a portal to this world that felt intensely rich and special.    

Dahlia de la Cerda, author of Reservoir Bitches

The book that made me fall in love with literature as a teenager was Frankenstein. I think it was the book that left a deep mark on me and made me want to write horror. It showed me that horror could be a means to explore much more complex topics – social issues, social violence, and structural and systemic violence. 

Heather Cleary, translator of Reservoir Bitches

I was completely obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a child, from before I could read the stories on my own well into my pre-teens. I guess in a way it makes sense, given how sleuthy translation can be.    

Julia Sanches, translator of Reservoir Bitches

I hazily remember the wonder and accomplishment I felt after finishing Black Beauty as a little kid in the U.S. In Brazil, as I was trying to read my way into learning Portuguese, I devoured Tintin and Asterix and Obelix.   

Christian Kracht, author of Eurotrash

That one book would be Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. There was this electric shock that zapped me as a young reader: Oh. Now I understand. This is what fiction can do. I remember very well closing Le Guin’s book and feeling empty and devastated that it was over, and yearning to physically go and live in those immense beautiful worlds that she created.  

Daniel Bowles, translator of Eurotrash

I vividly recall reading W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge in high school and loving the prose style, the narrative tone, the characterisations (Elliott!). It was also a huge relief and revelation for me at the time (and still is) to witness the protagonist Larry defy social expectations and choose a loafing search for meaning over capitalist indulgence and status. That was probably the first time I consciously realised literature could be a repository of human wisdom; it was a Rilkean you-must-change-your-life experience for me. 

Vincent Delecroix, author of Small Boat

Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parma (The Charterhouse of Parma); passion, speed, humour, subtlety, a twirling writing and memorable characters. 

Helen Stevenson, translator of Small Boat

My favourite book as a child was When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson, about loneliness and friendship. A girl goes to stay in East Anglia to recover from an illness. Alone under a huge sky, over the long weeks of summer, she is befriended by a ghost girl. I loved the way I could experience and recognise both loneliness and its remedy through the process of reading and make-believe.  

Ibtisam Azem, author of The Book of Disappearance

It wasn’t a single book, but the group of Palestinian poets and novelists who taught us our history and collective memory through their works. Our school curricula were curated by the Israeli state and our own history, as Palestinians, was silenced. In our Hebrew literature classes, we had to read Zionist literature which spoke of our homeland as empty land. This was antithetical to the oral memory and history I heard at home from my mother’s family who were internally displaced from Jaffa during the Nakba in 1948. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, before the advent of the internet. I was introduced to Palestinian literature outside of school. Writers and poets like Emile Habibi, Fadwa Tuqan, Ghassan Kanafani, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others, shaped my worldview and helped me understand my homeland and people’s history. Later, when I studied German literature, reading Wolfgang Borchert and Kafka was transformative and influenced how I understood reading and writing. 

Sinan Antoon, translator of The Book of Disappearance

It wasn’t one book, but a series of books that enchanted me early on. So much so that I neglected my schoolbooks and homework. I remember enjoying Dickens’ The Tale of Two Cities, Dumas’ The Black Tulip, both of which I read in Arabic, and the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, amongst others. 

Solvej Balle, author of On the Calculation of Volume I

A Danish children’s book called The Blue-Eyed Pussy in English, which I first encountered in kindergarten. It is about a cat with blue eyes who is constantly told by the yellow-eyed cats that it is not a real cat, but in the end they have to admit that it is. A moral tale in seven chapters with a lot of repetition. I still know it by heart. It said ‘novel’ on the front – I remember asking my mother what a novel was, but I don’t remember her answer. 

Barbara J. Haveland, translator of On the Calculation of Volume I

The first books that I clearly remember reading are The Hobbit and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I was seven at the time. I still have these books (my original copies) on my bookshelf and have returned to them again and again over the years. My dad fed me books – he realised that Penguin’s wonderful Puffin and Peacock lists were a guarantee of quality fiction for children and teenagers and would bring me bundles of them home from the bookshop. For me there was nothing better than a pile of new paperbacks. 

Lucy Scott, translator of On a Woman’s Madness

My favourite book as a child was Little Women. I read an illustrated and abridged version of the book as a child and then an unabridged edition as a teenager.  

Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Solenoid

As a child I was enchanted by Huckleberry Finn. As a teenager my role model was the musician Adrian Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. V by Thomas Pynchon was the book that impressed me the most when I started writing literature. In fact, I could say about myself what Franz Kafka said about himself: ‘After all, I am nothing but literature’. 

Sean Cotter, translator of Solenoid

My parents were, for a brief time, Stormy Petrels, that is, members of a Sherlock Holmes discussion group that held an annual costume ball. If stories could make my mother and father dress weirdly, they must be powerful. When I read The Sign of Four, I was proud of finishing a grown-up book, and I expected adulthood to be weird. It has turned out to be the right attitude.

Anne Serre, author of A Leopard-Skin Hat

It wasn’t one book but a series: The Famous Five, in the French translations by Claude Voilier. Reading them was one of the great joys of my childhood. Naturally, I identified with Claude-Claudine (the French version of George-Georgina) who behaved like a boy and wanted to be given a boy’s name so that she would be treated like a boy. At 13, I wrote my ‘first novel’, The Clan of Eight, which was obviously a childish pastiche of The Famous Five. I even sent it to the publisher of the French series, who took the trouble to reply, very kindly telling me that it wasn’t good enough to publish, but encouraging me to continue writing.    

Mark Hutchinson, translator of A Leopard-Skin Hat

The first book I can remember reading was The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The first to make a powerful impression upon me was Peter Rabbit, followed by The Wind in the Willows and the adventures of Tintin; then, a little later, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Treasure Island.   

Hiromi Kawakami, author of Under the Eye of the Big Bird

Greek myths, Norse myths, Arabian Nights, Journey to the West, Japanese myths – that’s what I would read over and over again. The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, too. It’s from these books that I learned that stories can be limitless.

Asa Yoneda, translator of Under the Eye of the Big Bird

When I was eight I accidentally read part of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Boy, did it scare me into learning more about the world

Banu Mushtaq, author of Heart Lamp

Rather than naming a single book, I have been influenced by an immense number of books. Ever since I learned to write the alphabet as a child, I have been writing. 

Deepa Bhasthi, translator of Heart Lamp

I’ve been around books my entire life, and cannot quite pin my interest in literature down to one book, but perhaps it springs from my grandmother who used to live with us. She raised me on stories, two-three a day, more if I begged her enough. When telling stories she became the characters, changing her voice, speaking in gestures and facial contortions. I was mesmerised. I still am, when I think of her. She is who made me want to tell stories, both as a writer and a translator. I wanted to try to replicate in readers the sense of wonder her narration evoked in me, and I hope to do with the written word what she so effortlessly used to do with her hands and face and body.   

Astrid Roemer, author of On a Woman’s Madness

Not a book, but a children’s song from Annie M.G. Schmidt (1911-1995), a much-loved Dutch poet and writer. I’d heard ‘Dikkertje Dap’ – about a boy of my own age chatting along with a giraffe - every morning on the radio in Paramaribo, and since then I understood that language is like clay: I could do anything with it. I still favour that childhood song.