Nikita Gill: ‘I read Flowers in the Attic too young. Someone should have stopped me’

The Indian-Irish poet on the Mahabharata retelling that inspired her to write, Arundhati Roy’s courage, and the poetry of Lucille Clifton

My earliest reading memory My father was a sailor and my mother a teacher. They were both voracious readers. I was lucky enough to come from a home full of books and when we joined my father out at sea for extended periods of time, my mother carried plenty of books for me to read. I remember sitting by the porthole in our cabin, looking out at the sea on a sunny day, the ship moving calmly through the waters. I was reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, a book that still feels like a dream. I was four years old.

My favourite book growing up There were so many, but when I was a child experiencing the death of my great-grandmother, a maternal figure who I adored, The Neverending Story by Michael Ende became the most essential read for me. I must have read that book a hundred times. I also loved the Winnie-the-Pooh books, Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, the Panchatantra tales, Malgudi Days by RK Narayan and the Asterix comics by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.

The book that changed me as a teenager When I was 15, I read Ice-Candy Man (now known as Cracking India) by Bapsi Sidhwa. It is a visceral fiction about partition, centring on the stories of a four-year-old Parsi girl. It has stayed with me ever since because it taught me how fiction could be used to tell history.

The writer who changed my mind Arundhati Roy. Her advocacy is as courageous as her writing and every book she has written is a testament to the duty of the writer to care about this world. It began for me with The God of Small Things, but her nonfiction is also brilliantly fierce, especially The Algebra of Infinite Justice. I have been reading Roy’s work since I was 16.

The book that made me want to be a writer The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a mythological retelling of Draupadi from the Mahabharata in her own words. I was 21 and read the book three times to figure out precisely how it worked.

The book I came back to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I think I tried to read it far too young to appreciate how breathtaking it was – I was 12 when I first tried. I returned to it at 18 and devoured every word.

The book I reread Persuasion by Jane Austen. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth remain my favourite Austen pairing for a myriad reasons, not least among them the second chance of their love.

The book I could never read again I made the colossal error of reading the Flowers in the Attic series by VC Andrews much too young and, looking back, someone should have absolutely tried to stop me. I was stubborn and would have done it anyway, but someone should have tried.

The book I discovered later in life The collected works of Lucille Clifton. She was an absolute powerhouse poet and she taught me complex brevity and the powerful nature of poetry.

The book I am currently reading The Names by Florence Knapp.

My comfort read Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla.