Jacqueline Crooks: ‘Toni Morrison’s voice made me want to find my own’

The novelist on learning empathy from Charles Dickens, the playfulness of Irenosen Okojie and avoiding Jane Austen My earliest reading memory I was eight when I was given The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley, after being moved from my grand­mother’s care to live with my mother and her husband, who I barely knew. The story is about leaving one world, adapting to another. Surviving. It gave shape to unnamed feelings and developed my survival imagination: imagining beyond my circumstances. My...

By Jacqueline Crooks