MICHAEL NATH
The contemporary novelist and academic shares his top five reads with Judith Spelman
At the age of fifteen, in a valley in Wales, Michael decided he was going to be a novelist. Years passed and then around the age of thirty, he started writing short pieces that he called stories; a number of these were published, in magazines such as Stand. His first novel, 2010’s La Rochelle, was shortlisted for the James Tait Memorial Prize for Fiction.
He is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Westminster. His major teaching and research interests are in creative writing and modernism, as well as in Shakespearean drama. His last novel, 2014’s British Story: A Romance, was a Morning Star Book of the Year. Michael’s latest book is The Treatment.
WARWICK THE KINGMAKER by L Du Garde Peach. A Ladybird book, An Adventure from History, with illustrations by John Kenney
‘I suppose readers below a certain age won’t remember Ladybird books. At any rate, I think this was the first book I managed by myself, autumn 1968, in a flat in Swansea. My brother Dave was teething, so Mam put him in bed beside me as I read about Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, England’s power-broker in the Wars of the Roses. Each page of text was faced with a coloured picture. The first showed two lords riding on a muddy lane: “England was not a happy country.” The pictures and text have lodged in my mind: Henry VI looking hapless in a hut, Edward IV paying a captain with his fur-lined cloak; above all, Neville’s fate at Barnet in the fog, when his men attacked each other. As an image of death, this got me.’