THE BOOKS THAT CHANGED ME

Sebastian Barry is an award-winning Irish novelist and playwright, whose books include A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture. His latest novel is Days Without End (Faber & Faber), for which he won the Costa Award, about two young men who fight for the US army in the Indian wars and the Civil War, and yet find happiness.

VICTORY
Joseph Conrad

This is not supposed to be one of his great novels (he was unusual in that he wrote seven or eight of those) but try telling that to a young Irish writer in Paris, broke but determined, circa 1978. I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I still often think of Axel Heyst and his beloved Lena, nearly 40 years later. 

RELIGIO MEDICI
Sir Thomas Brown

I read this at Trinity College, Dublin, during that regular trawl through English literature at university. He was wonderfully learned in the old style, stuffed with arcane knowledge. His own prose style is deeply idiosyncratic, a little mad, and perfect. His self rises off it like a veritable ghost. You are soon sitting with him, as he unspools his thoughts. 

AROUND THE BOREE LOG
John O'Brien

This was a favourite book of my grandfather's, who had been out to Australia a few times. We shared a room in my childhood home, and oftentimes a bed in the cold winters, and he would read these poems to me in his sonorous old-fashioned fashion. "'Could I hear the kookaburras – once again!"' It almost made unofficial Australians of us both, he my age now in the bed, and I probably seven or eight.

COLLECTED SHORTER POEMS
Ezra Pound

This was all the stuff aside from The Cantos. I bought it in an old Faber edition in Hampstead, in London, in about 1974. In my years of travelling I brought it everywhere with me, a true vade mecum. The lovely high-quality cover wore away at the folds. It was a book to teach you everything about prosody, and something about the world. I had only a poor idea of Pound's disgrace during World War II. The poems are anything but disgraceful nonetheless – little engines of grace.