Margaret Atwood

I learned to read before I started school. My mother claims I taught myself because she refused to read comics to me. Probably my older brother helped: he was writing comic books himself, and may have needed an audience. In any case, the first books I can remember were a scribbled-over copy of Mother Goose and several Beatrix Potters, from her dark period (the ones with knives, cannibalistic foxes and stolen babies in them). Then came the complete, unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which my parents ordered by mail, unaware that it would contain so many red-hot shoes, barrels full of nails and mangled bodies. This was in the 1940s, just after the war. It was becoming the fashion, then, to rewrite fairytales, removing anything too bloodthirsty and prettying up the endings, and my parents were worried that all the skeletons and gouged-out eyes in Grimm’s would warp my mind. Perhaps they did, although Bruno Bettelheim has since claimed that this sort of thing was good for me. In any case, I devoured these stories, and a number of them have been with me ever since.

JG Ballard

The early childhood reading that I remember vividly was largely shaped by the city in which I was born and brought up. Shanghai was one of the most polyglot cities in the world, a vast metropolis governed by the British and French but otherwise an American zone of influence. I remember reading children’s editions of Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels at the same time as American comics and magazines. My favourite American comic strip was Terry and the Pirates, a wonderful Oriental farrago of Chinese warlords, dragon ladies and antique pagodas that had the added excitement for me of being set in the China where I lived, an impossibly exotic realm for which I searched in vain among Shanghai’s Manhattan-style department stores and nightclubs.

Later, when I was seven or eight, came The Arabian Nights, Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers, anthologies of Victorian ghost stories and tales of terror, illustrated with threatening, Beardsley-like drawings that projected an inner world as weird as the surrealists’. Looking back on my childhood reading, I’m struck by how frightening most of it was, and I’m glad that my own children were never exposed to those gruesome tales and eerie coloured plates with their airless pre-Raphaelite gloom, unearthly complexions and haunted-looking infants. The overbearing moralistic tone was explicit in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, a masterpiece in its bizarre way, but one of the most unpleasant works of fiction I have ever read. The same tone could be heard through so much of children’s fiction, as if childhood itself and the child’s imagination were maladies to be repressed and punished.

The greatest exception was Treasure Island: frightening, but in an exhilarating and positive way. I hope that I have been influenced by Stevenson as much as by Conrad and Graham Greene, but I suspect that The Water-Babies and all those sinister fairytales played a far more important part in shaping my imagination. Even at the age of 10 or 11 I recognised that something strangely morbid hovered over their pages, and that dispersing this chilling miasma might make more sense of the world I was living in.

During the three years that I was interned by the Japanese my reading followed a new set of fracture lines. The 2,000 internees carried with them into the camp a substantial library that circulated from cubicle to cubicle, bunk to bunk, and was my first exposure to adult fiction – popular American bestsellers, Reader’s Digest condensed books, Somerset Maugham and Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck and HG Wells. From all of them, I like to think, I learned the importance of sheer storytelling.

AS Byatt

I spent much of my childhood in bed, reading. I was disabled, set apart, greatly blessed by very bad asthma. What do I remember? What of all that fiercely explored forest of paper is still alive? The roots of my thinking are a tangled maze of myths, folktales, legends, fairy stories. Robin Hood, King Arthur, Alexander of Macedon, Achilles and Odysseus, Apollo and Pan, Loki and Baldur, Sinbad and Harun al Rashid, Rapunzel and Beauty and the Beast, Tom Bombadil and Cerberus. I have no idea now where I got all this, except for the Norse myths, which came from a turn-of-the-century book, Asgard and the Gods, bought by my mother as a crib for her ancient Norse and Icelandic exams at Cambridge. I read the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang and several collections of ballads, and “How Horatius Kept the Bridge” from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. The tales and myths and legends made it clear to me that there was another world, beside the world of having to be a child in a house, an inner world and a vast outer world with large implications – good and evil, angels and demons, fate and love, and terror and beauty.

Carol Ann Duffy

My birthday falls two days before Christmas and my early addiction to reading (“Get your head out of that book and outside for some fresh air this minute!”) solved the present problem. The obligatory doll lay unloved on the floor as I opened my books, often four or five of them at half-a-crown each. Which do I remember now? Little Women and Good Wives, What Katy Did, Kidnapped, and Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy, in Alcott’s first book, enthralled me. I was, of course, Jo – she wrote stories too – but her marriage to the kindly, dull Professor Bhaer removed some of her glamour as an early role model.

Later birthdays and Christmases yielded Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, and Dickens is an author whom I have read and reread annually, usually over the Christmas holidays or when ill in bed, although I have never dared to read his unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I would point to Dickens’s genius with common speech as an influence on my own writing. But maybe not so as you’d notice.

Germaine Greer

When I was going on seven my grandmother gave me Alice in Wonderland and The Water-Babies in the Collins Library of Classics edition. The last time I was in my mother’s house I sniffed them out, drawn by the luxurious scent of the red morocco in which they were bound. The feel of the book was the only thing I liked about The Water-Babies, which ends with a moral:

And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from

this parable.

We should learn 37 or 39 things, I am not exactly sure

which: but one thing, at least, we may learn, and that is this

– when we see efts in the ponds, never to throw stones at

them, or catch them with crooked pins, or put them into

vivariums with sticklebacks, that the sticklebacks may

prick them in their poor little stomachs, and make them

jump out of the glass into somebody’s workbox and so

come to a bad end. For these efts are nothing else but the

waterbabies who are stupid and dirty and will not learn

their lessons and keep themselves clean …

What was somebody to make of this faux-naif twaddle who was not only not a dear little man, but a girl tall for her age, who had never seen an eft, a vivarium or a stickleback? When I found a dictionary that had the word “eft” in it I discovered that Charles Kingsley, the professor of modern history from the University of Cambridge, was an unprincipled liar. The distrust of fiction engendered by this early experience has endured to this very day.

Judith Kerr

Else Ury wrote undemanding but inventive stories, and all of us at my primary school [in Germany, where Kerr lived as a child] devoured them, borrowed them from each other, discussed them and acted out the more dramatic episodes in the playground. There must have been a dozen of them, all dealing with one Nesthäkchen, an affectionate term for the baby of the family. She later embarked on another series called The Professor’s Twins, presumably to extend her readership, since the Nesthäkchen books were read only by girls. However, the twins had barely made it to secondary school in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power and my family fled to Switzerland, leaving him to confiscate all our possessions including, I suppose, my books by Ury. In any case, I’d probably grown out of them by then. However, months later in a Zürich bookshop I became very excited at seeing a new book by my favourite author. My parents must have thought that it would be a bit of home, for they bought it for me even though by then they could ill afford it.

I was interested to see that she had abandoned her usual middle-class academic setting for one of working-class hardship. The heroine was the daughter of an unemployed artisan, and she and her family had a tough time until one day a new factory opened in the district, the father got a job there, they had money again and everything was fine. On the last page she went out into the street with the other locals to cheer the man who had brought all this about. And for a moment, while Hitler’s eyes looked deep into hers, she knew that only happiness lay ahead. As I said, I’d really grown out of Ury by then. But it was a bit of a blow.

Whenever I hear of Tintin or Oliver Twist being banned from library shelves; when I read articles insisting that children’s books should be about tower blocks or one-parent families or fathers doing the chores; whenever children’s authors are enjoined to follow whatever the trend of the moment may be, I remember Else Ury. I wonder what became of her.

Postscript: After writing this I thought I would find out. I wish I hadn’t. I did not want this article to end on a note of horror, but it is what happened. Ury was Jewish. I don’t know why she praised Hitler in that last story, but it did not help her. Soon after it appeared, she was forbidden to write any more books. Not just to publish but to write them. After that nothing is known of her except that she disappeared in 1943. It is assumed that she died in a concentration camp.

Doris Lessing

I began reading at seven, off a cigarette packet, and almost at once progressed to the books in my parents’ bookcase, which would be found in any middle-class household then, and, for that matter, the section of the working class who saw books as a key to a better life. Sets of Dickens, Walter Scott, Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling. Some Hardy and Meredith. The Brontës. George Eliot – English classics but, interestingly, none from the 18th century. There were anthologies of poetry, a collection of impressionist pictures, many books of memoirs and histories of the first world war. I read, or tried, most of these before I was 10 or so. I read children’s books, some unknown to today’s children. The north Americans: LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books, Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did series, A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter and its sequels. Louisa Alcott. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The English classics were Lewis Carroll, who I like better now than I did then, and AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, which I adored then, but feel uneasy about now. The hero is a stupid greedy little bear, and the clever animals are ridiculous: good old England, I sometimes think, at it again. But there was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and a wonderful children’s newspaper, and a magazine called The Merry-Go‑Round that printed Walter de la Mare, Eleanor Farjeon, Laurence Binyon and other fine writers. De la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys entranced me then, and still had some of its magic when I recently reread it.

I believe that children are very bright when young and become more stupid as the hormones boil and bubble. I have taken tiny children, of three, four and five, to films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I have watched a four-year-old boy listen to an Ivy Compton Burnett dramatised on radio for an hour-and-a-half, not moving a muscle. By the time they are 11 or so they can only understand Neighbours.

Jan Morris

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Mad Hatter’s tea party, by Tenniel. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images

The first book destined permanently to influence me was certainly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, with which I bind up, mentally at least, Through the Looking-Glass too. I was read no trash in my mewling age, no footling Noddy-type books, but was thrown in the deep end with a great classic. I was taught to regard it as a classic, too, and to realise that while it was most certainly a book to be laughed with, it was never one to be laughed at. Its nonsense was art, its characters were serious, its verses were poetry, its Tenniel illustrations could never be replaced, its humour was a universal benchmark. Getting to know it was, I was led to suppose, a sine qua non of a fortunate and civilised childhood – a child without Alice was a child deprived. I agree with this elitist theory. I have loved and honoured the book from that day to this, and for me no other work of surrealism, whether in literature, in visual art or in the theatre, can match its antic genius.

Edna O’Brien

Ours was not a literary household, there were prayer books, one cookery book (Mrs Beeton) and bloodstock manuals. In our village there was no public library, yet I was in love with writing before I was acquainted with it; a pre-love if you like. My mother, an artist, I do believe, in her own right, disliked books, particularly fiction, believing it was redolent of sin. It was as if she herself had read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses in a past life and was still reeling from the bawdiness of it. I cannot remember the first book that I read, no matter how hard I try, but I do know that at 10 or 11 I read the occasional page of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. A copy was secured in our village, no doubt by some lovelorn wife or spinster, and was loaned by the page because all were avid to read this tormenting love story and all identified with it. In my girlish dreams, star-crossed love became the pulse of life, a notion I have never quite surrendered.

Ruth Rendell

The picture I can still see in my mind’s eye is of a dancing, gesticulating thing with a human face and cat’s ears, its body furred like a bear. The anomaly is that at the time, when I was about seven, the last thing I wanted was ever to see the picture again. I knew quite precisely where in the Andrew Lang Fairy Book it came, in which quarter of the book and between which pages, and I was determined never to look at it, it frightened me too much. On the other hand, so perverse are human beings, however youthful and innocent, that I was also terribly tempted to peep at it. To flick quickly through the pages in the dangerous area and catch a tiny fearful glimpse.

Now I can’t even remember which of the Fairy Books it was. Crimson, Blue, Yellow, Lilac. I read them all. They were the first books I read that others had not either read or recommended to me, and they left me with a permanent fondness for fairy stories, and with something else, something that has been of practical use to me as well as perennial fascination. Lang began the process of teaching me how to frighten my readers.

Kamila Shamsie

Peter Pan, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’s Aslan and all the characters around them taught me to dream and to imagine. There were minor notes of discordance, but they were hardly worth my attention amid the wardrobes that open into a world of eternal winter or the boy whose shadow runs away from him. In the Karachi of my childhood, where we had one state-run television channel and a sheltered life that rarely extended beyond the school yard and private homes, I walked through that wardrobe, and flew to Neverland with the boy and his shadow. And in doing so I learned that novels reach further than their own writers’ imaginations. Who do you write for? I am often asked, the question framed in terms of nation or ethnicity. My own childhood reading makes me impatient of such questions. CS Lewis is unlikely to have “written for” a girl in Karachi, but that doesn’t mean any boy in London grew up with a greater claim on Aslan than I did. It is a great gift to a writer, this early knowledge that there will always be people who don’t know the world you’re writing about, will miss allegories and allusions, and yet will love your books.

Tom Stoppard

There was a library on the troopship that brought us from India when I was eight. From the way I tried to divine the contents of the books purely from their physical appearances, with no sense of authors or titles, I would guess that I had read little or nothing before then. The first real book I read was Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome. By “real book” I mean a book that looked like a proper grownup book, 300 or more pages of solid text. I was quite surprised to discover that such an intimidating object could turn out to be gripping stuff. This was a few weeks after I arrived in England. I didn’t “know about books”. I noticed from the flyleaf of Peter Duck that the author had written others, and my method of searching for these books had a sort of dim pathos about it; I simply went around picking up any book I saw lying about to see if it was called Swallows and Amazons. But it never was.

However, Peter Duck broke the dam and when I arrived at my English prep school I started reading books in sets – the collected Arthur Ransome, Richmal Crompton, Captain WE Johns, and the usual classics – The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, The Coral Island, Stalky and Co, Three Men in a Boat. I would say that my reading was utterly conventional except in its voracity. I was the apocryphal child who read the sauce bottle and the cornflakes packet if there was nothing else to hand, and for years afterwards I simply wouldn’t contemplate getting on a bus without something to read, to the point once when I was in my late teens, of spending my bus fare on a secondhand book (I still have it: Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell by St Clair McKelway), preferring the devil of hitchhiking to the deep blue sea of enduring half an hour bookless.

Sue Townsend

I learned to read during the three weeks I was away from school with a spectacular case of mumps. (Mumps were mumps in the 1950s.) My mother went to a rummage sale and came back with a pile of William books written by Richmal Crompton, a person I assumed to be a man. I looked at the illustrations and laughed, then I tried to read the captions underneath these delightful scratchy drawings. My mother helped me out, and slowly and mysteriously the black squiggles turned into words which turned into sentences, which turned into stories. I could read. There should have been a 100-gun salute. The Red Arrows should have flown overhead. The night sky should have blazed with fireworks.

I joined the library thirsting after more William books. I read one a day and then two a day,then I ran out and fumbled along the library shelves pulling out books at random. Nothing was ever as good as William, but the die was cast, I was addicted to print.

• The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser, will be published by Bloomsbury on 21 May. To order for £7.99 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.