Andrew McMillan: ‘As an atheist, the poetry of Mary Oliver is the closest I come to prayer'

The Guardian

14-02-2025

My earliest reading memory
A memory of being read to, rather than of reading. Every time I was off school sick, I'd ask Mum to read to me from the Ladybird Children's Classic edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
My favourite book growing up
I was the boy who was very much into the Goosebumps books of RL Stine, the Shivers books of MD Spenser, KA Applegate's Animorphs series. All of them shared something of the ordinary moment of life made strange.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I came out to my dad when I was 16, and he came into my bedroom that night and gave me the meaty red slab of Thom Gunn's Collected Poems. More than anything, what felt transformative was just a simple sense of seeing for the first time that who I believed myself to be might be worthy of literature.
The writer who changed my mind
Everything you read, if it's good, should change your mind. Not in terms of opinion, but the chemistry of your brain and the way it deciphers the world should be altered; if only in a small way, if only temporarily. There's a phrase in Niall Campbell's third collection of poetry, The Island in the Sound, about a bee: 'The swelling queen quivers like a just struck match.' Each time I go to light a candle, I picture that.
The book that made me want to be a writer
It feels unfair to put the blame for that on a singular set of shoulders. There are writers whose tuning forks I want to hold closest to my ear as I write; chief among them is probably the novelist Jon McGregor ever since his debut If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.
The book or author I came back to
When I was younger I devoured Allen Ginsberg, and Diane Wakoski, and the anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain. That work is still important to me, but as I've grown older and calmed down, I find myself spending deeper time with the brilliance of work I might earlier have hurtled past. Seamus Heaney has become someone I find myself coming back to now, and more recently Michael Longley too, in his beautiful Ash Keys.
The book I reread
I have a recurring end-of-the-world dream. Not the event itself, but the aftermath, when there's nothing to be done but wait. I don't know why but you can ask my therapist, he has an interesting theory. There's something about a yearly reread of Nevil Shute's On the Beach that I find rhymes quite pleasantly with the night-time scenarios I tell myself.
The book I could never read again
Virginia Woolf's novels have always been ones I've held close, with The Waves being the very best of them for me. Reading the lush prose poetry of its sentences for the first time felt like such a magical experience that I've never really dared to return to it fully, in the way you might worry that, in returning to a childhood holiday, you'll find the place unglamoured from how you'd remembered it.
The book I discovered later in life
I have a habit of using the Nobel prizes as a shopping list. More recently that has involved using Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium and Jon Fosse's Morning and Evening as a departure, backwards, through their work. Next up will be Han Kang and Abdulrazak Gurnah. The same technique, starting with their forthcoming latest, and working backwards.
The book I am currently reading
Being sent proofs of as-yet-unpublished books feels like a kind of harmless time travel, a mild and relatively useless form of clairvoyance. I'm currently calendar-hopping with David Szalay's astounding and deeply unsettling Flesh. I'm also continuing the journey I imagine will take me the rest of 2025, traversing the epic terrain of Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy.
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My comfort read
Mary Oliver. As a devout atheist her Selected Poems is the closest thing I have to a religious text in the house. One poem each evening, like a small prayer.
Pity by Andrew McMillan (Canongate) is longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.