Frederick Douglass said: “Once you learn to read you will be free.” On this World Book Day (7 March, 2024) Cambridge hopes to help spark that enquiry. We want to encourage as many people (big or little!) to enjoy reading. To that end, we asked Cambridge authors and colleagues for their earliest or fondest memories of a literary world unlocked.

We also want to hear from you! Enter our competition to win a £200 Cambridge book voucher by telling your own story. Then explore free-access collections of book chapters and journal articles from our world of writing on literature and linguistics. You’ll find all this and more on Cambridge’s World Book Day Hub.

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Ankhi Mukherjee (Professor of English and World Literatures, Fellow, Wadham College, University of Oxford)

In the pre-teen years in India, I had acquired quite the heaving shelf of world classics for children, abridged. My classmates and I gifted each other these books on birthdays. An early favourite was Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. A glistening, mimosa-coloured hardback, the cover image that of a smiling Geppetto, his arm around the cheeky wooden boy whose fame has out-manipulated his puppeteer and creator alike. On the spine was Pinocchio in the throes of donkey fever, the equine ears in vivid contrast with the worried marionette face, diminutive in its round collar. I recall this with bemusement today for a variety of reasons: the gap between my sophisticated and ‘adult’ Bengali reading (especially the serialised novels in the magazine Desh I was devouring) and the age-appropriate English counterpart; the sliding of the signifier ‘world’ in pre-liberalised India; the fact that many of the books I clocked as English classics were in fact European works in translation.

Decolonisation is a dismantling, a tumult of painful but salutary change. Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, the volume I have co-edited with Ato Quayson, describes acts of mobilising that rectify what Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, described as the colonial malaise of immobilisation. It is not an exogenous process but one whose disruptive intent lies dormant in the aspirational structures of Anglophone cultures. In that bliss of reading Pinocchio, Heidi, The Last of the Mohicans, and Black Beauty out of context, in a comparative frame commercialised in India by Vintage Books, a mobilisation from puppet to human had begun.

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Ato Quayson, FGA, FRSC, FBA (Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Chair, Department of African & African American Studies (DAAAS), Stanford University)

My most memorable literary texts were not always introduced to me in the classroom, or on the cosines of my bed, which is where much of my reading ended up being done.  The work of Toni Morrison, for instance, was introduced to me in a quite different and dramatic context and provides a completely different counterpoint to the way in which I first encountered Achebe, Ngugi and others. 

Doctoral research took me to Nigeria in 1993, as fate would have it, just about the time of the elections under General Ibrahim Babangida. The elections were said by all observers to have been free and fair, but that did not prevent the General from annulling them. The country was thrown into a state of general confusion out of which some might argue it has not yet quite recovered. In the midst of all this, the Staff Club at the University of Ibadan proved to be an oasis of kindred spirits, all meeting to quaff beer, drink pepper soup, and generally lambast the government.

One of my closest companions then was Harry Garuba, then Senior Lecturer at the English Department. He asked me casually one day, quite unexpectedly, whether I had ever read any Toni Morrison.  No, I answered tentatively. I had picked up a copy of Beloved but hadn’t actually got round to reading it. Forget Beloved, he said. Let’s meet later this afternoon, not here, but at the bar behind the Student Union Building and I will show you what you are missing.

5pm found me there promptly. Harry got us about six bottles of chilled beer and two low stools on which we sat.

After an interval of two beers each, he pulled out of his bag Morrison’s Song of Solomon and proceeded to read me an extract from it. It was the point when Milkman and Guitar first go to see Pilate, Milkman’s aunt. His father had warned never to go to and see ‘that woman’.  But Guitar convinces him to go anyway. Pilate, we are told in the novel, chewed things: ‘As a baby, as a very young girl, she kept things in her mouth — straw from brooms, gristle, buttons, seeds, leaves, string, and her favourite, [when it could be found for her], rubber bands and India rubber erasers.  Her lips were alive with small movements. If you were close to her, you wondered if she was about to smile or was she merely shifting a straw from the baseline of her gums to her tongue. To Guitar and Milkman’s nervous ‘Hi’, her response is ‘What kind of word is that’, after which follows a period of emotional circling while the two youngsters try to ascertain as politely as possible whether the rumours they had heard about her not having a navel and other strange things were true or false, while she, calm but with her lips animated, kept pressing them to be more specific. She has the last word: ‘You all must be the dumbest unhung Negroes on earth. What they telling you in them schools?  You say ‘Hi’ to pigs and sheep when you want ‘em to move.  When you tell a human being ‘Hi,’ he ought to get up and knock you down.’ And so in the midst of the threatened collapse of his country, Harry read me Toni Morrison. It was a gift offering in a time of madness, a gesture of fortitude in a period of inarticulable bewilderment.  I have never forgotten it.

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Amy Laurent (Cambridge University Press)

My reading journey started in full force when I got my first pair of glasses at age six and dove headfirst into anything the library had on offer. While always a reader, I think there are a few seasons where I could be described as a voracious reader. In 2020, I read more than I ever had before, using books simultaneously as an escape and a way to connect with others. 84, Charing Cross Road, a short epistolary work by Helene Hanff, became a favorite in that period. These letters show the developing friendship Frank Doyle, a London-based used bookseller, and Helene, a New Yorker who is extremely particular about the books in her home library, from 1949 to 1969.

These days, I always have at least one audiobook in progress to keep me company as I walk the dog, commute to the office, or tidy up my shelves of print books. Favorite audiobooks include novel-in-verse The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo and All Systems Red by Martha Wells, the first novella in a sci-fi series about a security robot who would rather be watching TV.

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Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold (Programme Leader, Children’s Literature and Literacies Med, University of Glasgow)

There are so many children’s and YA books that have been important to me over the years, especially ones I’ve shared with my son, who is now a voracious reader himself. The first book I remember reading as a child was Funny Bones by the Ahlbergs. My son and I also went through a period where we listened to the audiobook version, read by Stephen Mangan, all the time! I also loved, and still love, The Moomins books: the themes of friendship, acceptance, and tolerance are both universal and timeless.

But, if we’re thinking about representation (the focus of my research), I’d say The Baby-Sitters Club series was really influential for me. As a young person of colour, growing up in Scotland in the 1990s, I didn’t have access to many books featuring people who looked like me. I think the first time I experienced any sort of ‘mirror’ was with Claudia Kishi from The Baby-Sitters Club . It didn’t matter that Claudia was Japanese-American and that I am British Asian, I guess (my parents are from Mauritius), it was just very cool to see an Asian teenager in a book, doing normal teenage things without being defined by their ethnicity (all while being incredibly fashionable, of course…).

I also love the recent, brilliant and adorable, Netflix series adaptation, which I absolutely recommend to everyone (not just young people). And, of course, Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses was mind-blowing for me when I first read it!

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Victoria Willingale (Cambridge University Press)

I learned to read later than many people. At age nine I went to middle school with very poor reading, well below the expected standard for my age. My teacher, Miss Abraham, spent a lot of time working with me to improve my reading and by the end of the year I had not only caught up but had jumped years ahead in reading age. Because I was older, I still vividly remember the feeling of the world opening up through words. It was exciting and vital. I couldn’t read enough: street signs out of the car window, cereal packets, the backs of toiletries, and of course books.

I have a memory, which if you saw from the outside would be completely unremarkable – a child in the backseat of an Astra staring out of the window at the streets as Bedford wizzes by. But on the inside I was fizzing with excitement, not just seeing but reading the street signs and feeling the enormous power this gave me. Opportunity.

I had discovered a secret world. YA book series like Goosebumps, Point Horror, Sweet Valley High, Anastasia Krupnik; the author Judy Blume; and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were read and reread. Multiple books were read every week, always at my library card limit.

Over time YA books transformed into novels, plays, novellas, non-fiction, and poetry. Not only did they allow me to escape into their stories, but they expand my reality and understanding of life, offering more perspectives, more worlds, and more experiences than I could ever have imagined.

Few places are more exciting to me than a bookshelf and I’ll always be thankful to Miss Abraham for what she gave me.