Booker Prize authors on the childhood books that made them fall in love with fiction

Book sculpture made from an old illustrated edition of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Booker Prize authors on the childhood books that made them fall in love with fiction

Published: November 25, 2025

From Roald Dahl to Frances Hodgson Burnett, discover the books that were instrumental in sparking Booker Prize-nominated authors’ imaginations

In October 2025, the Booker Prize Foundation announced a new prize, the Children’s Booker Prize. Awarded annually from 2027 and supported by AKO Foundation, it will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, with the winner selected by a combined panel of child and adult judges.

Inspired by the new prize, we asked Booker-nominated authors past and present – including some of this year’s judges and nominees – to recommend a book they loved as a child.

Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

‘I think it was Just William, by Richmal Crompton. I remember being very excited as I read; I remember being delighted, and laughing. All of the adults in the book were eejits and William and his gang, the Outlaws, got away with everything they did. William’s boredom was funny and perfectly understandable; the grown-up rules were often ridiculous. Even his dog, Jumble, was perfect – because he was just a dog. There was nothing cartoonish about Jumble, or anything else in the book. It was real life – and it was my life, somehow.’

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, author of A Spell of Good Things

‘It was a mix of several books, but I’ll stick to two. I read what was probably an abridged version of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between when I was seven or eight, and I stayed up late to finish it. I remember weeping and feeling heartbroken for days by the story because the characters felt so real to me. Another unforgettable book from my childhood was Without a Silver Spoon by Eddie Iroh. I can still recall specific incidents and scenes from it even now. With Iroh’s book I was also invested in the young boy at the heart of the story.’

Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age

‘There’s a children’s book called The Monster At the End of This Book and it terrified me in a way that made me come online. I knew what was coming and I was still afraid. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle also evoked this feeling. I remember seeing the one illustration in the book – the round robin, a sign for mutiny – and it left me completely cold in all the best ways. The search for this literary dread stays with me even now.’

Claire Adam, author of Love Forms

‘Just one book? In the beginning, there was Enid Blyton, then C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Ursula le Guin. All the horsey Pullein-Thompson books. Peanuts. The Far Side. The 36-volume encyclopaedia in the bookshelf in the hall at home. Medical textbooks. Things Fall Apart, by Achebe. I didn’t think of it as love of reading, exactly – more like a grafting onto one’s consciousness, an expansion of the self.’

Susan Choi, author of Flashlight

‘All of the books I most loved as a child fall into this category, but Mary Norton’s series The Borrowers, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series were the chief influences, the books that made me start writing very imitative, derivative stories, when I was seven or eight years old. I still totally idealise The Borrowers and The Dark is Rising – which I have not actually re-read since childhood – but I had a painful parting of the ways with Narnia, probably because I’ve read them in adulthood, since I was most determined to impose them on my own children. When I did, I realised that the books were not as I remembered them. Me and my kids put them aside.’ 

Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

‘The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. This was, after all, an Indian childhood and my bookshelf was full of English children’s books, some that I inherited from my parents’ time. My copy is a 1954 clothbound edition, the pages honeyed, but the illustrations still sharp. I loved this book about the shabby, tender joys of home, contrasting with the lure and gleam of adventure. Which way to go? The story also nurtures a profound love for the natural world. Whenever I think of Toad of Toad Hall poop pooping his automobile horn, of Mole driving out the pesky weasels with the war-cry, ‘A mole! mole!’ I laugh out loud.’

Book covers — *Just William* by Richmal Crompton, *The Go-Between* by L.P. Hartley, *The Monster At the End of This Book* by Jon Stone, *We Rode to the Sea* by Christine Pullein-Thompson, *The Dark is Rising* by Susan Cooper and *The Wind in the Willows* by Kenneth Grahame

Ben Markovits, author of The Rest of Our Lives

‘For my bar mitzvah, somebody gave me a copy of Edith Sitwell’s Atlantic Anthology of British and American Poetry – for which she wrote a series of eccentric but also wonderful introductions to the poets she admired. This is the kind of thing she wrote: ‘Swinburne had one of the most flawless and wonderful vowel techniques in our language’. I didn’t know anyone had a vowel technique, but it opened up a world where writers seemed to be talking to each other through time. After that I started chasing down old volumes in second-hand bookshops. I liked the way one book led to another.’

Andrew Miller, author of The Land in Winter

‘Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth. People of a certain age will remember Sutcliffe’s work for young readers. She was, first and foremost, a very good writer. Quite a lush style (as I remember it). And a wonderfully vivid historical imagination. As much as anything I can think of, she turned me on to fiction set in the deep past. Us, but not us. Does anyone read her now? I don’t know. Some of it might seem a little quaint. But I loved it.’

David Szalay, author of Flesh

‘There was this book, My Side of the Mountain. I read it when I was about 10 or 11, I suppose. My memory of it is so intense, and yet so vague, that I actually had to look it up to make sure it really exists, that it wasn’t just something I dreamed. It does exist, and it’s easy to see why I loved it so much: it presents a vision of an idealised solitude – a 12-year-old running away from society and civilisation and fending for himself in some American wilderness – that obviously touched something in me at the time. It’s my earliest memory of falling in love with a book.’

Ledia Xhoga, author of Misinterpretation

‘I have a vivid memory of borrowing Roald Dahl’s The Big Friendly Giant from the library, reading it while walking home, and hitting a pole with my head. Hoping nobody noticed, I put the book away at once, but a second later a friend caught up with me. She was laughing hysterically. I enjoyed fantasy and adventure books, especially the ones that presented some moral dilemma or the fight against oppression.’

Benjamin Wood, author of Seascraper

‘I had a brilliant English teacher at school named Mrs Seddon who introduced me to John Steinbeck’s novella The Red Pony, aged 13. It shocked me how deeply I felt for the two main characters, Billy Buck and Jody, and how vividly their Californian ranch was rendered in my mind by Steinbeck’s descriptions. It’s always stayed with me, that feeling of immersion in the setting and situation of the story, and I’ve hoped to find something close to it in every book I’ve picked up since.’

Maria Reva, author of Endling

‘Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel. My mother and I would listen to the taped version together in our early years of immigration to Canada, and it’s partly how I learned English. Also, The Twits by Roald Dahl. Before that book, I didn’t know that terrible people could exist in books – especially books for children – and how fun it was to read about those terrible people.’

Natasha Brown, author of Universality

‘When I was about 12, I decided to read Wuthering Heights because I couldn’t sleep and it looked really boring. I ended up not sleeping at all that night. I’d found my first ‘unputdownable’ book.’

Anne Michaels, author of Held

‘When I was around 12 years old, in the sound of the washing machine and sitting on the bottom steps of the cellar, I finished reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. It was momentous to me that a character, after hundreds of pages, could reach the place they were born to reach and somehow, in doing so, mend something greater. There was at last a justice to all that the characters had experienced, endured, learned from. It was also my first real awareness of just how powerfully a book can transport us from the here-and-now (the washing machine!) to near-total submergence in a fictional world. And it was landscape too – realising I had fallen into an intimacy with places I would recognise for the rest of my life.’

Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake

‘I recall receiving Alice in Wonderland as a present from my grandmother. It came in the mail, to our house in Eugene, Oregon, and I went into my room and started to read and sat until I finished it. I was young, maybe six or seven. I can still summon the intense feeling I had, of transmission, of images and world and mood, from the pages into me. A secret being deposited. This was reading.’

Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

‘All my life I’ve loved reading – I was the kid who just wanted to lie on the sofa and read a book. I loved all of E. Nesbit, and Swallows and Amazons, Harriet the Spy, Watership Down, The Wizard of Earthsea – as well as some perhaps less well-known books that became part of my imagination for life – Elizabeth Goodge’s Henrietta’s House, Eric Linklater’s The Wind on the Moon, John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, Ivan Southall’s Ash Road… I could go on…’

Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

‘I was brought up surrounded by books, so my childhood memories seem almost to be mostly about reading. One memory stands out above all others: my father gave me a copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was 10, and I remember where I was sitting when my heart broke as the black flag was raised above the prison where Tess was being held. That was when I understood the full power of fiction: that it can move a reader just as much as a real event. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.’

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

‘Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. That amazingly evoked relationship between a boy and his dad helped me understand (in my own kid-way) something new about the love between parents and children, and my own love for my parents.’

Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep

‘That would be the first novel I ever read: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I was 10 and not much of a reader at all. That summer we spent a few months with my grandparents in the middle of a Dutch forest. I was bored out of my mind and picked up Burnett’s novel – half ironically – out of sheer desperation for entertainment. It worked. It was escape and it was comfort and recognition, a high I’ve been chasing with each book I read.’

Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional

‘From birth I was absorbing the stories read aloud to my older sister, and we grew up with books everywhere. I see now I loved the repetitive pleasure of the story series: Paddington Bear and Mary Plain, Enid Blyton of course. I especially adored Mary Norton’s The Borrowers books, about a species of tiny people who live beneath floorboards and between the walls of ordinary human houses, who borrow our unnoticed lost trinkets and scraps for furniture and food. I loved the possibility of other realms of existence, the idea that hidden lives could be busily flourishing all around me.’

Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot

‘In the third grade I read over 100 Nancy Drew novels – every Nancy Drew novel that had, at that time, been published. When I finished the series I was under the impression that there were no more books to read. Thank goodness there were.’

Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

‘We didn’t have any books at home, so I came to reading quite late in life. When I was 16 my mother died and I had two wonderful English teachers, Mr Arthur and Mr Archibald, who, in trying to help me pick up the pieces and make something of my life, pressed Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy into my hands. Everything that Tess and Jude went through in the 1890s still felt relevant in 1980s, and the struggle of characters trying to triumph over their circumstances and better their situations has been central to my own work.’

Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen

‘The book I loved most must have been Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard because of where it occupied in my consciousness and how it shaped my aesthetics. It is a truly strange book, but an unforgettable one as well.’

Tim Winton, author of The Riders

‘I guess I enjoy telling stories to and for kids. Kids are not yet sniffy about the ‘legitimacy’ of narrative. Kids are not suckholes, either. If you’re boring them, they’ll let you know in very direct terms. It’s nice to be relieved of the passive-aggressive bullshit grown-ups mistake for civility. I loved Treasure Island as a kid. Stevenson never condescended to younger readers.’