Author Inga Simpson.






The Complete Adventures of Blinky Bill - Dorothy Wall
The illustrated tales of a mischievous young koala was first read to me by my mother. I still remember how upset and angry I felt when Blinky's father is shot. The book inspired an early affection for our native flora and fauna, and a budding environmental consciousness. Today, I am lucky enough to live among koalas in the wild.

 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
I had already devoured The Hobbit when my father brought home The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. The trilogy was a little old for me (I was still only 10 or 11) but reading it opened up a whole world of imagination and mythology. It was the ents that I was most fascinated with, and reading LOTR again as an adult, alongside The Silmarillion, I am struck by how important trees are to the story.

 Beowulf
I excelled at one subject during my undergraduate degree: Old English literature. I had some German, which made translation easier, and felt a weird affinity for the Anglo-Saxon language and Scandinavian setting of Beowulf, a heroic epic poem from between AD700 and 1000). So, while all my fellow students wisely chose T.S. Eliot or Thea Astley as the subjects of their honours theses, my topic was dragon-slayer Beowulf.

 The Mint Lawn - Gillian Mears
The story of a young woman, Clementine, still living in the Northern Rivers town where she grew up galvanised my passion for Australian literature. Mears' capacity with the sentence, the lyricism and imagery in her work, and her representations of rural landscapes, brought me back towards realism. In many ways, my study of her work started me down the path that led to writing fiction myself.

 The Lives of Rocks - Rick Bass
This collection of short stories was a gift from my partner that has kept on giving. Discovering Bass led me to a long backlist of his short stories, essays and novels, and into yet another world: nature writing. His body of work with the natural world as its focus has been central to the process of finding my own voice as a writer - and my place in the world.

 Inga Simpson lives on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and is working on a nature writing project, Notes from Olvar Wood, and researching Australian nature writing for an MPhil in literature. Her novel, Mr Wigg, is about a man who tends an orchard in the last year of his life (Hachette).