Literary editor of ‘The Spectator’ Sam Leith is surrounded by books of various genres every day. His latest non-fiction work ‘The Haunted Wood’ takes an exploratory look into childhood reading from Aesop’s fables to Malorie Blackman. He speaks to Georgina Godwin about the world of children’s literature, the first book he read as a child and the authors who created the stories we know today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is an author, journalist and the literary editor of the Spectator.
He's been a judge of every major UK literary award, including the Booker and the Bailey Gifford Prizes, and has been a columnist for the Guardian, the FT and the Evening Standard.
His previous non fiction work includes Dead Poets, Sods Law and you'd Talking to Me.
His novel, the Coincidence Engine, about secret agents investigating wild coincidences, was shortlisted for the Bollinger F Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.
His latest work, History of Childhood Reading, is the Haunted Wood.
Sam Leath, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Hello.
Thank you for having me.
What was the first book that really inspired you?
What's the first thing you remember reading?
Ah, first thing I remember reading.
I do have a very strong memory of reading.
I think it would have been probably a Ladybird, but one of the, you know, a very standard, un literary kind of crunched down version the Robin Hood legend.
And as a tiny thing being in floods and floods of tears at the end when Robin, you know, on his deathbed fires an arrow out of the window where he's going to be buried.
And I Remember, I think BB's, you know, Dennis Watkins Pitchford's book Lord of the Forest, which bizarrely is a novel about an oak tree.
So, you know, not a lot of geographical movement in that, but that also had me in tears.
Yeah.
So I sort of realized quite early on the power of children's writing.