Tagged by Nicolette Bethel:

The deal is to name 25 writers who have influenced you, and then tag 25 people.

Hear ye the gospel according to Fragano: “Influence” does not mean the same thing as “enjoy a lot.”

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I’ve taken “influence” to mean a variety of things. You should probably not do that.

(in some sort of order)

Margaret Atwood

I’m not sure why she influenced me. I read two of her novels a long, long time ago. The thing is, I remember them. The Blind Assassin haunts me to this day.

Junichirō Tanizaki

Much to the annoyance (?) of my friends, voyeurism became a hot topic with me ever since I read Tanizaki’s Seven Japanese Tales and later, The Key. We made our first short film about a voyeur-artist. It’s a shit film, but we made it.

More significantly, Tanizaki helped me create Prabhu, the voyeur-writer, and to study gaze as part of the creative process. (But that’s boring.)

Fyodor Dosteovsky

He made me stop fearing the Russian classic.

Anaïs Nin

Nin made me start writing in a diary. She is also a self-indulgent, elitist bitch, which tells you a few things about me, I should think.

JD Salinger

My one and only novel, written when I was sixteen, came about soon after reading Catcher in the Rye. What was the novel about, you ask? Oh, a sixteen-year-old who thinks her father and the academy are phonies, and experiences a set of events that lead her to do various “bad” things. I was pretty influenced, yeah.

Sylvia Plath

Say what you like about her, my first reaction to ‘Tulips’ was, “I want to write like that.” Ariel is one of my favourite books of all time.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro inspired one of my most memorable arguments with a publisher of “readable” Indian fiction who believed that “you don’t need craft to write pulp fiction” and “no one reads Ishiguro”.

Mahasweta Devi

She did not influence my writing as much as she did the way I see the world around me. She is also a favourite writer of mine.

Albert Camus

I stuck with French partly because I wanted to be able to read him in the original. And I did.

Virginia Woolf

The power of the semicolon!

Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things is a terrible novel. However, when I first read it, I was young and impressionable and didn’t know that. A Roy made me want to write a novel. It’s true, Salinger inspired the story, but A Roy made me think I could actually write it. So I wrote it. It was awful and I was sixteen. That is also something I seemed completely unaware of — the awfulness of my own writing and how sixteen-year-old it was. I actually looked up an agent for it. A Roy’s agent, no less. Luckily I grew up a little before I printed and sent my novel out to the poor unsuspecting man. But that’s not the point. The point is: I wrote a novel and I was sixteen and A Roy made me do it.

Louise Bogan

One of those poets I have only read online, thanks to the dearth of poetry books in India. One day I will meet her poetry in more pleasing circumstances. Here is a favourite: ‘Evening in the Sanitarium’.

William Blake

I learnt that poems must sound tight and beautiful. Must try being more Blake.

JG Ballard

He writes about civilisation and cars and doesn’t bore me. He makes me see things in new ways. He makes me wish I had been reading science fiction all along. (I’ve only read one of his books.)

Patience Agbabi

A woman with presence and poetry. I attended one short workshop with her and she introduced me to the art of the dramatic monologue. I haven’t got it down yet (hopefully it’s something that will happen in the forseeable future), but she got me working on it all right.

Salman Rushdie

For saying this: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

Elfriede Jelinek

The power of the first (four) line(s)! (“The piano teacher, Erika Kokut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother. Erika is in her late thirties.” Translation by Joachim Neugroschel)

Susan Coolidge

A highly underrated writer, in my opinion. The What Katy Did series comforted me, made me think there was a place for silent, awkward girls in this world.

Bill Watterson

Something had to make me start reading the newspaper. Calvin and Hobbes used to be my prize if I read the front page.

Agatha Christie

I returned after a summer vacation of reading Christie in the Himalayas (fancy, huh? I so needed to get that in) to a sixth standard class in which everyone was still reading Sweet Valley.  Then I decided to read Rushdie, failed, and went right back to Christie. I love you, Agatha! I would name my cat after you, if they ever let me take care of an animal by myself!

Italo Calvino

He was cool and Italian and stuff.

George Perec

I never fully understood the whole “constraint is good for your writing” thing until I read Life: A User’s Manual.

TS Eliot

It’s hard not to mention him in such a list. One of the few writers you’re forced to read in school and still like/love/love to hate.

Jane Austen

The power of wit and irony!

Ayn Rand

I believe that once you get over your Ayn Rand phase you become whole. Whole, because you experience so much shame that puberty seems a non-issue and you want to figure out the bigger things in life. Like, how am I going to keep myself from falling into that trap again? And that’s when you start reading the really good stuff.

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The tagged unfortunate

E Kristin Anderson
AR
Claire Askew
CS Bhagya
David Borrelli
Toni Clark
Stef Convery
Phill English
Asawari Ghatage
Aruni Kashyap
Todd Keisling
Kk
Mike Lim
Nicholas Liu
Weihui Lu
Roh
Neha Mujumdar
Charles Musser
Joshua Muyiwa
Katrina Outland
Kala Ramesh
Salli Shepherd
Nisha Susan
Sridala Swami
Frank Vorassi

I couldn’t find enough bloggers to tag, so the ones who don’t have blogs can use Facebook. Please tag me so I can read. And don’t hate me for tagging you. </sheepish>