Cassie McCullough

And the librarian clearly hadn't read it and I hadn't read it and I didn't know what to expect.

But I did read it and it blew my head off because the book was called A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

And for a 14-year-old who hadn't quite read anything like that before, it was absolutely astonishing and fascinating.

What it did with language and the subject matter, everything about it was confronting and frightening and horrifying, but just utterly compelling.

I loved every moment of it.

I read that book back to front.

And for the first time, I really understood what books could do and what language could do.

And I discovered that that was really the terrain that I wanted to sit inside and think about.

It was just so rich and so interesting.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

It introduced me to questions and themes that I hadn't encountered before and in a way that was...

unavoidable.

It was the perfect car wreck of a novel to read at that moment because I just couldn't look away.

I had resolved fairly early in my life that I was going to be a writer and I was going to write.

When I was about 16 or thereabouts, I determined that I wasn't going to go to university.

I was going to leave home and work a range of jobs and

to afford me the time to work on my first novel and serve my apprenticeship that way.

And so in my late teens is when I was working on my first novel, Rhubarb.

It was the books that I read in and around there, the classics but also contemporary novels that were hugely influential.