Am I who I am because of the books I read as a child?
This is the question I asked myself as I reflected on the life choices I had made so far. Expat, traveller, adventurer, risk-taker, translator, linguist, lifelong learner, researcher, and aspiring writer are all words I could use to describe myself. Let’s trace the steps that led to my pursuing a Master of Research degree in the art of Storytelling.
If my parents’ stories are to be believed, I started reading by the time I was four years old. I seem to recall being able to read rather fluently in first grade (age seven) while most of my classmates were only beginning to grasp this indispensable skill.
On a school day or not, you could always find me with my nose in a book. First, there were fairy tales and children’s fantasy literature, of course. The stories of the Brothers Grim, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) and L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) captivated, at times terrified, but most of all delighted me as a child.
By the age of twelve, I had settled on Adventure Travel as my preferred genre. Authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World), C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days) and J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit) were among my favourites.
Then the Harry Potter films came out and immediately every kid who could read the alphabet went out and bought the books. When the fifth book came out (The Order of the Phoenix), I borrowed it from a friend who had already gotten it in English rather than wait for the Bulgarian translation. The book was published in 2003, so I must have been 14 when I was reading it aloud to my friends at sleepovers: reading and simultaneously translating it into Bulgarian.
Of course, I was soon told what a nerd I was, which shifted my reading tastes from YA literature toward Literary fiction (a.k.a. ‘serious’ fiction). The first novel I read was Gone with the Wind because that was the second thickest book on our home bookshelves (I wasn’t ready, and I don’t believe I would ever be ready, to read War and Peace). Then followed Pride and Prejudice, The Lord of the Rings, and many others that I found on the BBC’s Big Read list. I read the books mostly in English, downloaded illegally on my computer. By the age of 17, I knew perfectly well that I didn’t belong in my country’s culture and that I would eventually leave.
Fast forward to 2018, I studied English linguistics in Belgium, from where I went to teach English as a trainee in France. Teaching English fast became a full-time profession for me in 2019 when I moved to Spain. My master’s degree did, however, sow the seed for a passion for study and research that has brought me here, to a postgraduate research programme in Storytelling. Not only am I doing what I love, but I am also improving my writing skills along the way and paving my way towards a PhD in Creative Writing soon. I hope that one day my own stories will inspire a child to go out and explore the world.
Keep reading,
Julian Steele
