The writer’s bookshelf: Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig is an award-winning poet and short-story writer. He is the author of numerous collections including The Lammas Hireling, The Blind Roadmaker and, most recently, An Arbitrary Lightbulb.

Ian’s New and Selected Poems won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 2022. He has won the National Poetry Competition twice as well as the Forward Prize for Best Poem.

He is currently working with the artist Juliet Gutch on Confluences, a project about the River Wharfe.

What was your favourite book as a child?

Probably a Bunty Annual from the late 1950s. Learning to read, available material was dominated by the tastes of my five elder sisters who had been brought up in Limerick, where girls’ comics were unknown. Then one day I found in our bookcase an early edition of Puck of Pook’s Hill which featured Kipling’s personal publisher’s mark – the one that included a swastika. I consumed it immediately and by the time I realised the Nazis weren’t going to put in an appearance, I was enjoying the book anyway.

You could probably draw a line from Puck through to things I’ve written since like ‘The Lammas Hireling’, but that tradition is more complex than imagined. Francis Young’s recent Fairies: A History usefully elucidates all their political significance, discussing the Bridget Cleary tragedy, who was murdered by her husband who believed she was a changeling. This took place in the part of Ireland my family came from and an old rhyme could still be heard there in my youth:

Are you a witch or are you a fairy
Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?

At a more psychological level, in an online interview Young was stressing how ancient beliefs in the fae are; asked why we dreamt up such things and he said, I think, for company. Our ancestors inhabited desperately bleak lonely landscapes, so they populated them in a manner like Beckett’s Unnameable.

Books and characters stay with me. Puck, or Bunty, for example, especially its strip with Broncho Buttercup, the showjumping cow.

What book has had the biggest influence on either your thinking or your writing?

Being completely honest, the Bible. My mother bought a magnificent one from a club when I was small, illustrated by painters like Caravaggio and Rubens. I loved these pictures like the cinema. The text was another matter. At school they tried to browbeat us all into thinking its contents were plausible or contained secret meanings. Later, even as an altar boy I doubted, especially the Old Testament. Our priests and teachers gave the impression that the Old Testament was only really for Jews and Protestants, and mad stuff got in there somehow. But when I read later, say, the Book of Job in the King James Version, I was astonished by the power of its ‘Arabic poetry’ as Coleridge described it. Anyway, the Bible influenced my thinking because I came to associate it with great art and writing which had to be reconciled with what were, to me, frequently incomprehensible moral positions.

Do you have a literary guilty pleasure?

I read books by and admire works by artists whose views I am unsympathetic to, or whose behaviour is/has been reprehensible for various reasons. Great claims are made for literature’s power to develop empathy in readers, but empathy is not the distinguishing feature of the literary worlds as I have experienced them in these islands. Gottfried Benn, failed Nazi, supervising doctor at the execution of nurse Edith Cavell – these were unlikely to endear him to the British poetry-reading public but he remains a major European poet.

Do you turn first to fiction or non-fiction for pleasure?

Non-fiction. The spirits non-fiction call up for me are always weirder than art. I got a book from Oxfam once about the care of fancy rats and it was fascinating, although I’d never kept them nor intended to. But I somehow fell in love with them I used their beautiful class names in a poem: ‘Flame Point, Champagne, Opal, Mink, Dove, American Berkshire, Agouti Buff, Cinnamon Pearl, Silver Fawn Rex, Chocolate, Topaz, the Dark-Eyed Self’. If Ted Hughes had his Thought Fox, I had my Thought Rat.

What writer or books do you most go back to?

Re-reading is a continuous process for me with many books. Ulysses I go back to a lot, as too The Third Policeman with its weird poetic ideas and profound moral implications – when I read Tristram Shandy, I could see the lineage, the hobby horses evolving into bicycles, Flann O’Brien’s and Beckett’s. I love Sterne’s book and continue to be inspired by it.

Among my contemporaries, I am re-reading Alice Oswald’s Dart, which I admired on publication, but even more so now. Denise Riley has been a light for a long time. Anthony Vahni Capildeo continues to astonish me. I read with Martina Evans at the Irish Embassy recently and her new book Drunken Driving is terrific. I used a lot of Martina’s books when I was doing sessions with Leeds Irish Health and Homes. I’ll be going back to Karen Solie’s Wellwater and among younger poets, Matthew Rice’s Plastic is a powerful engagement with wage slavery.

What writer or book have you most changed your mind about?

Peter Reading is a much better poet than I understood initially, not least because his use of classical metres requires you to know them to understand, a bit like Tennyson’s rhythmical inventiveness. It took me a while to properly appreciate Emily Dickinson and not want to sing everything she wrote to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. Gwendolyn Brooks too, so I think hearing the rhythms of American speech on the page took practice and it may be why I was initially unenthusiastic about late Auden. Stevie Smith is a much more significant poet than I realised at first, though I always liked her work; Jeremy Noel-Tod has written well about her importance.

What was the last great book you read?

I think that might have been The 1812 Grimms’ Fairy Tales which I read for research when I was writing a catalogue essay for Christopher P. Wood’s Grimms paintings exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery in 2025. Even at the time people had a sense the Grimms’ book would change European culture, drawing in linguistics, politics, literature and folklore research.

Recently I was reading about the Golem in relation to Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block, Its Index (Catling melted the type used to set his book into the Thames, as in some Golem legends they melt into the river at the end of their usefulness to humans or if they get out of control). Anyway, I learned in the context of this that the Europe-wide collecting of Jewish folklore which included the Golem was undertaken by Jewish scholars partly in response to the Grimms’ work.

The influence of Grimms’ Fairy Tales in these islands was enormous too, of course, but troubling: the Allied commanders after WWII saw something in it so dangerous that they banned it in Germany, which they didn’t do with Mein Kampf. I always knew about the Grimms, if superficially, but the 1812 book, mainly by the more scholarly brother Jacob, was powerful and raw while Wilhelm’s later versions were more cooked. Lots was cooked up, plagiarised but the line between folklore and ‘fakelore’ is thin and, I feel, to a large degree, artistically irrelevant.

What’s at the top of your to-be-read pile?

British Mining No. 46 – The Grassington Mines by Mike Gill and Men of Lead by David Joy. I’m researching a project with the artist Juliet Gutch on the River Wharfe with the working title Confluences. Juliet designed the new Ilkley fountain, itself sited at the confluence of two becks running down from the Moor. The Wharfe begins and ends in confluences from two becks to where it joins the Ouse, the Humber and the North Sea. It passes Grassington with its old lead mines and as a poet this makes me think of Auden and of Catling’s The Stumbling Block, Its Index again with its molten-lead-like cover. Catling described the book as “a direct attempt to write sculpture” and I might try that line on with the funders.