Derek Owusu: ‘I didn’t read a book until the age of 24’

My earliest reading memory
When I was about four or five, I think. I was living in Long Melford, Suffolk, with my foster parents, and my foster dad was trying to teach me how to read using those Biff and Chip books.

My favourite book growing up
I never read a book until the age of 24, so there wasn’t a favourite until I was about 25, and they usually changed with every new book I read. It started with St Mawr by DH Lawrence, then EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Time Machine by HG Wells, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and then it was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for a very long time. But that lost its place last year when I finally read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov.

The book that changed me
The book that changed me as a young man was The Will to Change by bell hooks. Until I read that I didn’t really know what being perceived as a man was all about. I kind of just drifted through life never having thought about it. Or if I did, it was so surface-level that it essentially meant nothing.

The writer who changed my mind
Benjamin Zephaniah. I emailed him out of the blue once and we started a correspondence that built into a friendship. He and my partner at the time convinced me to do a master’s in creative writing. I was hesitant, because I’ve always considered myself not very clever. But he said I could do it. And I did.

The book that made me want to be a writer
There are three: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, and The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Ellison gave me access to the strings behind a novel, showed me the pieces it was made from. And Rankine and Daley-Ward gave me permission to write a novel however I wanted to, to shape it in any way I felt necessary.

The author I came back to
Henry James. I tried him almost a decade ago – I think it was Washington Square – and it seemed so dry and impenetrable that I decided I wouldn’t bother again. But I did try again, as I always do, earlier this year. I picked up The Aspern Papers and suddenly James’s writing opened up to me, the voice on the page so strong, the sentences so satisfyingly unique and complex, that I ended up reading five novels in a row. My next is The Bostonians.

The book I reread
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can’t remember how I discovered it but I read it whenever my self-esteem drops to dangerous levels.

The book I could never read again
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. At first I remember thinking how beautiful the prose was. That changed very quickly and it all became really cloying. Once I got to all the descriptions of jewels and beautiful things from around the world I called it quits. That was the first time I had ever got that far into a novel and stopped. Even thinking about it annoys me.

The book I discovered later in life
A Good School by Richard Yates. I think it’s his best novel. A friend from work had told me her favourite novel was Revolutionary Road so I made a note to read it. Years later I picked it up and decided to read everything Yates had written. It wasn’t until I got to A Good School that I was truly taken by that feeling of just loving something instantly and intensely.

The book I am currently reading
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes.

My comfort read
The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. For anyone who experiences depersonalisation, this book will pull you out of it and remind you the external world is in fact real.