Fantasy foremost. As with so many, yes, it began with Lord of the Rings. Yes it doesn't have this and it doesn't have that; yes it was written by a man who does not possess in many respects a contemporary sensibility and is open more than most - because there is so much to him - to erroneous revisionism, but for all that (for all art is flawed, even Mozart) it's a literary masterpiece. Deal with it! Fantasy I like in general, either writers who are genuine stylists or can tell a rollicking good yarn with real literary competence. I do not ascribe to the almost fascistic mindset that insists upon 'clear pane of glass prose' fiction. Very often less is not more, less is just less! J.V. Jones, Janny Wurts, George R R Martin, Tad Williams, Greg Keyes. They write, I mean, they really write, engage with story and word, and sometimes, gloriously, these words draw attention to themselves - this is part of the difference between literature and life. If the language gets in the way of the story then there is something wrong with it? No. In literature language is part of the story. Then a couple of prolific writers who always maintain a gold standard for their own stuff. David Gemmell. Holly Lisle. And are vital - in the way they have gone about their business - as examples for anyone wanting to make it as a professional writer. New stuff: Alison L R Davies - this girl can write! A born storyteller. Mark Chadbourn - manages a thematic synthesis between old worlds and new, where the old world through historical depth, the fantastic and the recognisable present day all merge into a genuinely involving literary melting pot. James Barclay - can write breakneck action fantasy and with his present major duology, Cry of the Newborn and Shout for the Dead, does, after six romping action fantasy Raven books, what every writer worth his or her salt must do: develop, expand to pastures and plateaux new. It's easy to spot those who never do.

I'm not sure I write like any of these writers, which on one major level is a very good thing. But I am learning from all of them.

Horror. More psychological slasher fiction than gallons of verbal gore. There is more fear in the gestation of the very idea than in the literal display of it in action. Science Fiction. More partial to invented worlds than particles of invented words. Stuff with as much heart as it has head. General. Conrad. One of the greatest prose stylists in any language of any age. Where style is integral to content, for words on the page as fiction are not real life, they are a reflection of real life but something other in themselves. Literature should contain the intricacy in the moment, the clarity of the detail. But people have busy lives, the work must be instantly accessible, the cry goes up. Then we are fast entering the realm of 'text literature' because folk don't have time and then before we know it we have dumbed down in content and aspiration and abbreviated experience to a virtual nothing rather than the virtual something it should be, and literature is dead! The Russians: mainly Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Turgenev. The Brontes not Austen. Austen is the more accomplished writer, but there is so much more going on in the Brontes. Dickens. Frightening, gargantuan sprawling imagination. Poetry. Keats. Living within 10 minutes by Tube from his home in Hampstead is a pilgrimage. Died in his mid-twenties and one of the greatest of English poets. Shelley, Browning, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge. Mandelstam. Rilke. Archaic Torso of Apollo is a philosophy for life. Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott. Breathtakingly accomplished and beautiful their gold mined. Contemporary 'serious literature' - hah! I turned my back on most of it after university. Emperor's new clothes a huge amount of it, read and reviewed by those of the same mindset among the broadsheet literati who also wear the same clothes. Among them all and a maverick on the periphery of that world - because he can out-write most of them into oblivion, and they know it, particularly the Booker judges - another superb stylist and very, very funny: Howard Jacobson. Shakespeare. Herodotus. Two of the greatest fantasy writers of all time! Just a small sample among many of the stuff that goes into making up my writing, bookish world.