READING MADE ME DO IT!

Pretty much everything I’ve done in life has been informed by reading. I moved home a lot when I was a kid and as I changed from school to school, country to country, the one constant I had was the love of a good story.

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That led me to being a bit like a certain literary character who was flunking pretty much everything except English. After a degree and 24 years of teaching the subject, I want to share this love and passion for the written.

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I proposed to my wife through a poem and I share every day my love of literature with my students both face-to-face and online. To me, books are a way of time-travelling, of communicating with the past and a way of seeing to future. If there is one thing that unites us (and sometimes divides us) it is narrative; a right can of worms!

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I’ve taught thousands of students and I’ve encouraged them to carry the torch of reading with them. Wherever I go in the world, I carry a book – including when I moved to China with about a thousand books, which were soon impounded by Customs – just so that I could have something familiar to help me settle into my new environment.

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I’m here to share my views!