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I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.

Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.

When I was 14, I saw a library for the first time.

When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That's what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.