Novelist Jacqueline Crooks reflects on the books and writers that have shaped her reading life and her own work, from childhood experiences of displacement to a commitment to centring marginalised voices. She says Toni Morrison’s imaginative, Black-centred fiction particularly encouraged her to develop her own voice, while writers including Dickens, Brontë and Shakespeare influenced her understanding of empathy, landscape and belonging.

Crooks recalls reading The Water-Babies after moving from her grandmother to an unfamiliar household at eight, and finding resonance in its themes of adaptation and survival. She returns to Wilson Harris and Irenosen Okojie for their inventive use of landscape and language, rejects Pride and Prejudice’s socially confining world despite admiring Austen, and is currently reading Andy Beta’s biography of Alice Coltrane, whose music influenced her new novel, Sky City.