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| ‘Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting made me want to be a writer’ … Joe Dunthorne. Photograph: Hayley Benoit |
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Books
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life
Joe Dunthorne: ‘Growing up in Swansea, I developed an allergy to Dylan Thomas’
The author on feeling Thomas Hardy’s pain, being duped by Donna Tartt and how reading his sister’s copy of Trainspotting made him want to write
Joe Dunthorne
Friday 24 April 2026
My earliest reading memory
I only realised how well I knew the Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes when I started reading them to my own children. Every time we read one now, I’m suddenly back in my attic room in Swansea 40 years ago, watching my dad turn the same pages.
My favourite book growing up
At 10 years old, I read only Terry Pratchett. As far as I was concerned, there were no other authors. I loved everything he wrote but my favourite was Mort, where the eponymous protagonist is Death’s young apprentice. He learns the skills of the trade: traipsing between appointments, meeting the soon-to-die and reaping their souls. I liked how it made the afterlife seem ordinary, even bureaucratic, with the Grim Reaper more like a taxman – unwelcome wherever he goes.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy was a set text at school and that alone would normally have been enough to make me suspicious. But something about this book cut through. Tess was the first fictional character I properly believed in. When she died, the pain I felt was real. I didn’t realise books could do that to you.
The writer who changed my mind
When I first started writing a book about my family’s German-Jewish history, my parents – who are historians – kept asking: “Are you sure this is a good idea?” And the truth was I wasn’t sure. In fact it seemed like it might be a terrible idea. It was only when I read HHhH by Laurent Binet that I found a book that gave me permission to approach the subject with both levity and seriousness, to tell the story in my own voice, with the subjectivity intact.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Probably my older sister’s copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting when I was 17.
The author I came back to
Growing up in Swansea, I developed an allergy to Dylan Thomas. He was inescapable, an industry to himself. So for a good 20 years or so, I turned against him. And, to be honest, I still don’t get much from his poetry (particularly when he reads it himself in his boom-boom voice). But I’ve recently come to love his short stories, especially the autobiographical stories in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog. They feel wonderfully warm and irreverent.
The book I reread
For a long time, I did not reread any books on the principle that it would be wasting an opportunity to discover something new. How wrong I was! The one I keep coming back to is Meadowlands by Louise Glück. The spareness of the language really suits multiple readings. Her poems are often about the shifting perspectives of age so, in a sense, her subject is rereading. As she famously puts it: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”
The book I could never read again
When I was 18, a teacher lent me a copy of The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I devoured it; I loved feeling part of this intellectual friendship group where their discussions of Greek philosophy carried undercurrents of sex and danger. It showed university life as I wanted it to be. But returning to the book – after having actually been to university – I felt as if I’d been conned.
The book I discovered later in life
I was late to Marilynne Robinson but then I read Housekeeping and it barrelled straight into my list of all-timers. I will never forget the image of the train derailing on a bridge above a glacial lake and how, “like a weasel sliding off a rock”, it plunges into the deep.
The book I am currently reading
Thomas Bernhard’s deliciously bitter My Prizes, a very short book about the nine times he has been awarded a literary prize and all the small and large ways he has found to be ungrateful about it. It’s shocking and refreshing – the literary equivalent of a cold plunge.
My comfort read
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. After my son was born, this was the book my partner and I read to each other in bed during the night feeds. Sitting in the dark at 3am, we wanted nothing more than to escape into Ripley’s world of money, murder and boat trips to Palermo.
