Get your head out of that book!’ – the children’s stories that inspired leading writers

From sinister water-babies to Chinese warlords, Norse gods to star‑crossed lovers … In a new edition of a volume first published in 1992, writers recall the tales that shaped their imaginations

Print from 1860s edition of Gulliver’s Travels, published by Nelson & Sons. Photograph: Alamy

Margaret Atwood, JG Ballard, AS Byatt, Carol Ann Duffy, Germaine Greer, Judith Kerr, Doris Lessing, Jan Morris, Edna O'Brien, Ruth Rendell, Kamila Shamsie, Tom Stoppard, Sue Townsend

The Guardian - Saturday 9 May 2015 

Margaret Atwood

I learned to read before I started school. My mother claims I taught myself because she refused to read comics to me. Probably my older brother helped: he was writing comic books himself, and may have needed an audience. In any case, the first books I can remember were a scribbled-over copy of Mother Goose and several Beatrix Potters, from her dark period (the ones with knives, cannibalistic foxes and stolen babies in them). Then came the complete, unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which my parents ordered by mail, unaware that it would contain so many red-hot shoes, barrels full of nails and mangled bodies. This was in the 1940s, just after the war. It was becoming the fashion, then, to rewrite fairytales, removing anything too bloodthirsty and prettying up the endings, and my parents were worried that all the skeletons and gouged-out eyes in Grimm’s would warp my mind. Perhaps they did, although Bruno Bettelheim has since claimed that this sort of thing was good for me. In any case, I devoured these stories, and a number of them have been with me ever since. 
More