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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford: ‘It was the sorrow of my life at age 10 that there wasn’t one more Narnia book to read’

Francis Spufford.
Ursula K Le Guin showed me that a built world could ring as true narratively as anything observed in the streets of this world’ … Francis Spufford. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

My earliest reading memory
Tolkien’s The Hobbit, read around the time of my sixth birthday, when I was home from school with mumps. It turned me from a painstaking decoder of printed letters into someone flying through a new medium. Books have been portals for me ever since. Many other things too, but portals first.

My favourite book growing up
CS Lewis’s Narnia books. It was the sorrow of my life at the age of 10 that there wasn’t one more of them to read. A few years ago I found myself in a position to do something about that, at least for myself, but (cough) I am under legal obligations not to talk about it.

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