‘I owe Iron Maiden my English A-level!’ The great literature our writers discovered through pop music

‘I owe Iron Maiden my English A-level!’ The great literature our writers discovered through pop music Ahead of World Book Day on Thursday, Guardian music writers pick out the musicians whose literary references illuminated them – from Adam Ant on Joe Orton to the National on Grace Paley Penelope Farmer via the Cure I first heard the Cure’s Charlotte Sometimes as a teenager, and it was like waking up from a dream. With dissonant guitar chiming like church bells and opaque lyrics about preparing for bed, it unburied a childhood memory of reading Penelope Farmer’s ghostly 1969 book of the same name. As a child I’d found it fantastical: on Charlotte’s first night at boarding school, she wakes to find herself 40 years in the past, in the body of someone else, with an unfamiliar moon in the sky. But as a teen, re-reading the story on Robert Smith’s recommendation, it held a mirror to my increasingly uncertain sense of self. To hear Charlotte’s disorientation play out through uneasy bass and Smith’s dizzying, doubled-up vocals was strangely comforting; confirmation that growing up has always felt like time-travelling. Learning that the band recorded it exactly 10 years, to the day, before I was born was further proof: my own cosmic link to a past life. Katie Hawthorne Oscar Wilde via the Smiths I bought Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in my youth because Morrissey had mentioned him in the Smiths’ Cemetry Gates (“Keats and Yeats are on your side / While Wilde is on mine”). Also, I desperately wanted to impress a Morrissey obsessive in Hull with whom I’d been corresponding, who was coming to visit. I’d acquired Alan Sillitoe’s glorious Saturday Night, Sunday Morning – referenced in Vicar in a Tutu – for similar reasons and hoped that my combination of a vintage cardigan and a 1930s typewriter from Leeds market would convince her that I was a Yorkshire Mozzer. Sadly, we were both so nervous on the day that our initial interactions involved leaving messages for each o...