Award-winning writer Derek Owusu reveals the literary journey that began later in life, the influence of friends like Benjamin Zephaniah, and the classic texts that boost his confidence and inspire his work, according to theguardian.com.
Owusu shares a surprising truth about his early life: “I never read a book until the age of 24.” His earliest reading memory is of his foster father using “Biff and Chip” books when he was four or five, but serious engagement with literature came much later.
His favourites, which frequently changed as he devoured new titles, began with D.H. Lawrence’s St Mawr and included E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For a long time, the top spot was held by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, until it was recently unseated by Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
The author credits bell hooks’s The Will to Change as the book that profoundly changed his understanding of masculinity, stating that until he read it, he had only “drifted through life” without truly examining what it meant to be perceived as a man.
A pivotal moment in his career came through his friendship with the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah. After emailing him “out of the blue,” a correspondence grew into a friendship. Despite Owusu’s initial self-doubt, Zephaniah and his partner convinced him to pursue a master’s in creative writing. “He said I could do it. And I did,” Owusu recalls.
Three books are responsible for igniting Owusu’s desire to write: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible.
“Ellison gave me access to the strings behind a novel… 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.”
Owusu describes a powerful return to the work of Henry James. After finding an initial attempt at Washington Square “dry and impenetrable,” he tried again this year with The Aspern Papers. The experience was transformative. The “strong” voice and “satisfyingly unique and complex” sentences led him to binge-read five James novels in a row.
For a confidence boost, he regularly revisits Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance whenever his “self-esteem drops to dangerous levels.” His ultimate comfort read, which helps combat feelings of depersonalisation, is Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, which serves as a reminder that “the external world is in fact real.”
However, not all literary experiences are positive. The one book he would never read again is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. What started as an appreciation for the prose quickly became “really cloying,” causing him to quit the novel—a rare occurrence.
Among his later-life discoveries is Richard Yates’s A Good School, which he considers Yates’s best novel, describing an instant and intense feeling of love for the work.
Owusu’s latest novel, Borderline Fiction, is published on 6 November by Canongate.
•Featured image: Derek Owusu/Suki Dhanda/The Observer
