Samantha Harvey: ‘I wrote love letters to Ross Poldark. Is this an admission too far?’ | Samantha Harvey

My earliest reading memory
Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian. This book will always stay with me; it was perhaps the first one I read on my own that disturbed me, and presented me with a world in which there was pain, neglect and suffering, and also towering kindness. The older I get the more grateful I am to my parents for filling my early life with books – for the joy of them, and also an understanding that life is out there.

The book that changed me as a teenager
It’s weird how voraciously you read as a teenager and how books arrow into you. I remember reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and there began my dabbling with ideas of Buddhism and taking myself off to silent retreats; it also seeded my decision to study philosophy, and got me interested in ideas-led fiction. So, life-changing in some ways. (Thank you, Hermann Hesse.)

The writer who changed my mind
CS Lewis in his books on Christianity: The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy. I wolfed down these books. They didn’t make me a Christian, but they made me understand why Lewis was, and how radiant, potent, beautiful, strengthening and, well, logical religious faith can be. I wanted to become a Christian after reading them – I wanted to have what he had. But I don’t think this kind of faith is in me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Still Life by AS Byatt, Waterland by Graham Swift, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. These books because I read them at roughly the same time and it must have been when some inkling of being a writer was taking shape in my mind. Some dim sense of could I do that? I was reading and was excited by the act and possibilities of reading, and this excitement began, by stealth, to feel like a call to action.

The book I reread
I come back most often to poetry – to Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (Ted at his most problematic and glorious), to Anne Carson, to Jack Underwood, to Thomas Hardy, to Alice Oswald, among others. Poetry is the touchstone.

The book I could never read again
Most novels I could never read again. If a novel doesn’t really move me then I won’t want to read it again, and if it does then I usually daren’t go back to it in case it doesn’t move me again. I learned this lesson by rereading Siddhartha. It was about a decade later and it had none of its transformative power. It isn’t the book’s fault – the change, of course, was in me. That hungry, searching teenager was gone. And it made me miss her!

The book I discovered later in life
So many. So many! A Month in the Country by JL Carr; The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing. Both delicately monumental.

The book I am currently reading
Two-Step Devil by the brilliant American writer Jamie Quatro. I’m about to start The Land in Winter by the also brilliant Andrew Miller.

My comfort read
I know this isn’t cool, but it’s the Poldark novels by Winston Graham. I read them all when I was in my early teens. I wrote love letters to Ross Poldark. Is this an admission too far?