Derek Owusu: ‘I didn’t read a book until the age of 24’

‘Until I read The Will to Change I didn’t know what being perceived as a man was all about’ … Derek Owusu. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

My earliest reading memory
When I was about four or five, I think. I was living in Long Melford, Suffolk, with my foster parents, and my foster dad was trying to teach me how to read using those Biff and Chip books.

My favourite book growing up
I never read a book until the age of 24, so there wasn’t a favourite until I was about 25, and they usually changed with every new book I read. It started with St Mawr by DH Lawrence, then EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Time Machine by HG Wells, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and then it was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for a very long time. But that lost its place last year when I finally read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov.