My earliest reading memory
My mother taught me to read from a book she borrowed from the St Johns, Antigua public library. It was a biography of Louis Pasteur, I suppose to make me understand something about him. She told me the milk I drank was boiled, and the whole process was because of him. I must have been three then; by the time I was three and a half, I could read anything.

My favourite book growing up
I didn’t have lots of books growing up. But the one I liked most was the King James version of the Bible. I read it from beginning to end and had so many quarrels with it. That story of the prophet who was going up to heaven in a Chariot of Fire was pretty amazing, but then when his bereft servant, having witnessed this terrifying event, was returning home, some children made fun of him and called him a bald-headed man. He was so offended that he summoned a bear to eat them up. Of course, I would have been one of those children.And don’t get me started on the New Testament, that celebrity magazine. For my seventh birthday, my mother gave me a concise Oxford English Dictionary. I read it all the way through, from A to Z.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was miserable and I mostly read about the lives of people who were far away. I remember that DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned and someone who had been to England and returned home with a copy passed it round. All of us kept looking for the exciting parts.

The writer who changed my mind
Elizabeth Bishop didn’t so much change my mind as transform my life as a writer. Someone had given us one of her books for Christmas and I disliked the person so much that I refused to look at it. Then one afternoon, as I was sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper at my typewriter, I idly opened the book. What follows is most likely memory making a romance for the self: I read the first poem, closed the book and proceeded to write my first short story, called Girl. That story is one sentence long and a little over 600 words. It felt as if someone had opened a door to a room and said “come in”.

The book I could never read again
Without a doubt, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

The book that made me want to be a writer
When I was about 10, my French teacher thrust a book at me. It was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and I was never the same after that. I used to pretend I was both author and protagonist at the same time; other times, I took turns.

The book I reread
Jane Eyre: I discovered the word “gloaming” in that book, and a flower called “delphinium”. I never thought it was a romance; I was struck by the suffering of every person in it. I suppose that was when I began to understand how, no matter what, the world contained  an overwhelming atmosphere of suffering, which kept you pinned to Earth. It was suffering, not gravity, that was the controlling force.

The author I discovered later in life
Louise Glück.

The book I am currently reading
I am now reading a few books at once: A History of Portugal and The Portuguese Empire, which comes in two volumes; a life of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and a life of Vasco da Gama.

My comfort read
Plant catalogues, though there are almost no good ones left any more. And I love EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books. I try to reread them every few years and have succeeded in getting friends to join me. We add vowels to our names when we are writing to each other and think we are being very “Lucia and Georgie”.