‘It led me to some risky places’: The book that made me who I am today, by Tessa Hadley, Kate Mosse and more

There are an infinite number of questions one might ask an author in the hopes of better understanding their work, but few yield as enlightening and revealing an answer as: What book made you the writer you are today and why?

And so this is the query we put to eight of the brilliant authors on the line-up at this year’s Hay Literature Festival, including the recent recipient of its medal for prose, Elif Shafak, whose latest novel, the century-spanning There Are Rivers in the Sky, wears the influence of her telling selection on its sleeve.

From the classics to the unexpected, their choices traverse biting satires, indelible short stories and fantastical worlds. What all these titles have in common, though, is the impression they left on authors whose works do the same for others.

And truly, what better source for recommendations for your summer reading list than this?

A brilliant and ambitious novel – published in 1847, the year before she died – it’s about violence, about the power of landscape, about obsession, about race and the restrictions on women’s lives and a ghost story to boot. More than anything, it’s a novel that changed what was possible for women to write and inspired the sort of novelist I would, years later, become. The final paragraph – when the narrator Lockwood looks at the headstones of Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton on the moors – is all beauty, all reflection, and brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.

Humour is so often undervalued in literary fiction, and as a new writer of satirical fiction, the work of Everett has been a powerful guide to me. The Trees, a novel that explores the harrowing history of racial violence in America, is incredibly, raucously funny, and provides a completely fresh take on a subject matter that has been well-trodden by tomes of worthy and sometimes saccharine fiction. In this work, Everett powerfully demonstrates the capacity of humour to skewer social and political injustices with astonishing ferocity and effectiveness.

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Among all the novels I have read and reread from an early age onwards, Orlando has a special place in my heart. Virginia Woolf’s remarkable novel, playfully called a “biography”, spans three centuries and transcends boundaries of geography, time and identity. From Elizabethan England to the Ottoman Empire, with the beauty of its prose and brilliant humour, it is fascinatingly layered and definitely worth revisiting again and again. It is incredibly brave, creative, imaginary, intelligent, and essentially, water-like. Orlando is a fabulous testimony to what a novelist can do with the long form. I associate this book with “freedom”.

I first read Wuthering Heights at 15, thinking it was a love story. And so it is in many ways: there’s toxic love, and thwarted love; and innocent love, and delusional love. But mostly I fell in love with the words, and the very familiar scenery of the Yorkshire Moors, which, of course, is the real love story: the one between Brontë and her world. I re-read it every few years. It’s like going for a favourite walk, where every time I see something new.

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How far back would you have to go to find the book that made you? Somewhere deep down in the mulch, I suspect there is [Arthur Ransome’s] Swallows and Amazons… But let’s be serious. At that plastic moment of youthful formation where fateful decisions about life and self are made, I was reading DH Lawrence, above all, The Rainbow. Certain heady fictions work on youth like revolutionary or religious texts; they seem to tell you how to live and what to trust. And because Lawrence writes superbly, I don’t regret his influence, though it led me into some risky places. He’s fierce and subtle on behalf of life.

A house that lays an egg. The goddaughter of the north wind. A tiger that runs faster than the wind. These are just some of the exquisite fantasies of Aiken’s limitless imagination, found in this little book of children’s stories. It was the first childhood book that not only fascinated me, but inspired me to dream up possibilities, stories and worlds of my own. All these years later, when part of my work involves using stories to open people’s eyes to inequality and abuse they might not experience themselves, and another part involves telling the story of a better life that lies within our grasp, I still come back to Aiken. I owe her a debt of gratitude for showing me that a book could be a window into another world.

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Since childhood, my favourite novels have been centred around family, and it’s all I want to write about now. “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,” was Austen’s own maxim – she was right about that, as she was on most things. The genius of Elizabeth Jane Howard is that she pushes that still further, with her chronicle of just one family, over three generations, through several decades, in a sequence of five spellbinding novels. A delight to read, and the perfect example of how it’s best done.

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I read Marine Life when I was 20 years old. These linked stories, set in Vancouver, the city of my childhood, have a grace and force and precision like a stone inscribing glass. Three decades ago, Alice Munro wrote of Svendsen’s collection: “The last story left me shaking.” That work, “White Shoulders,” is one I hope that many readers will hold onto – a devastating story about devotion, complicity and sorrow.

The Hay Festival is taking place in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales, on 22 May to 2 June