Alan Brough has been a broadcaster, dancer, singer and is known on ABC TV's Spicks and Specks as a professional music nerd. He has always wanted to be a writer and his first children's book is Charlie and the War Against the Grannies (Pan Australia).
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Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
I first read Godot when I was 14. I didn't understand it. However its effect on me was profound. Until then I thought drama was Alan Ayckbourn, comedy was The Two Ronnies and a work of art had but one distinct interpretation. Godot showed me that inaction could be dramatic, that bleakness could be funny and that one short play could be interpreted differently by everyone who encountered it. It still influences everything I do.
The Fall
Albert Camus
I didn't know a book could challenge every assumption I had about what it meant to be a 'good' person. I didn't know anything could challenge every assumption I had about what it meant to be a 'good' person. Each night I would lie in bed and battle with that tiny book and its huge consequences. I can't remember what I thought when I finally finished it. I suspect it was 'Oh f---!'
The Scarecrow
Ronald Hugh Morrieson
I was born and raised in the small rural New Zealand town of Hawera. So was Ronald Hugh Morrieson. My Hawera was full of school and church and boring. His (fictional) Hawera was full of bars, sex and murder. That a writer – and a great one too – lived down the road and was a source of great inspiration to the teenage me.
Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
As is the case for many young men I read Catcher in the Rye during a very difficult period in my life. I felt like I was the rope in a tug-o-war between my old self (who I didn't want to be any more) and my new self (who I was still getting to know and wasn't sure I even liked). Catcher in the Rye said that inner turmoil was not only OK but essential.
