Where’ve You Been All My life?

4 great writers I took a long time to discover

Discovering how much you love a dead writer: there’s something different about that, I think. A fervency. Especially if they’re not in the Top 50 Famous Writers Of All Time. As if they were being deliberately kept from me but I’ve beaten the system.

It’s like my children enthusiastically discovering dead musicians: “Mum! I love Kurt Cobain have you ever heard of him?” Or, it’s like ghost-hunting.

There’s a point when I’m having my first taste of fiction by a dead writer that I have to stop myself from getting into their biographies like a stalker before I’ve even finished the book. I get the energy of a swot with a school project. “Who was this genius? Why did no one tell me about them?” Like a good little bibliophile, I finish the fiction and then I Google to my heart’s content.

It’s true that I have crushes on living authors, enjoy knowing a little about their lives – I’d read a book about Jaclyn Moriarty’s storytelling sisters in a heartbeat, and I devoured Maggie O’Farrell’s sevent…