Claire Fuller: ‘Dylan Thomas showed me that writing could make me feel everything’

The novelist on being inspired by Shirley Jackson, discovering the brilliance of Denis Johnson, and finding comfort in Elizabeth Strout My earliest reading memory When I was five and starting school, I would catch a coach from the Oxfordshire village where I lived. Twice a day I read the little metal plaque screwed to the upholstery, which gave the warning “Mind your head when leaving your seat”. My favourite book growing up In the late 1970s my dad had a copy of Phenomena by John Michell. Each page covers something strange, which might or might not be true: showers of fish, stigmata, spo

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