As a child I read Shakespeare and Dickens in abridged versions and translated into  French.

I found both writers at the time, tedious, strange and alien to my culture. I read in French and Spanish, my two natural languages in my youth and from my teens I read Cervantes,  Mauriac and Zola’s dark stories, Rimbaud’s  alchemical poetry, Theillhard de Chardin, Ávila, and San Juan de la Cruz’ mystical works. Later I was bowled over by Federico García Lorca’s and Pablo Neruda's poetry, the Latin American novel in general and in particular the fabulous magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez' works. Some of my favourite English language poets are  William Blake, Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman. As far as novelists are concerned, I enjoy C.S. Lewis, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, Doris Lessing, V.S. Naipaul and Mararet Atwood. Nowadays though, I tend to go for books I call ‘quest’ books, dealing with energy, life, consciousness, the nature of the soul and our place in the scheme of things.