Poet and playwright Joelle Taylor has credited Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as the book that rescued her from nine-year-old despair. Taylor, who spent much of her childhood in Bacup library, said the darkness and local landmarks in the story captivated her.
Taylor, the first in her family to attend university, was introduced to black female writers there. She cited Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf as a seismic influence, blending narrative, poetry and choreography.
Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language showed her how to be a writer, while TS Eliot's The Waste Land astonished her with its cinematic imagery when she revisited it later in life. She also praised Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue, which she shoplifted in the 1980s for its queer etymology.
Taylor described Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as a classic but harrowing read, wishing for more positive queer introductions. Her comfort reading, she said, is ghost stories, particularly English ones where the phantom represents the past intruding on the present.
