I’m asked this sort of question a lot, and I’m never sure how to answer, because there were all sorts of books which made big impressions on me. I expect the first was some long-forgotten picture book that my parents read to me in 1966 and which made me realise there was fun to be had in turning pages and seeing words and pictures. When I was a bit older, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and The Lord of the Rings hooked me on fantasy and imaginary worlds, while Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels opened windows into the history of the real one. A few years after that, a load of science fiction stories borrowed from the local library expanded my imagination in different directions. I suppose every book I’ve ever read has changed my life in some small way. Even the ones I hated helped to encourage me to write my own – I wasn’t sure I could really write, but I knew I could do better than that!

The book which probably had the biggest effect on me is not a novel or a short story collection but a book of pictures. The Land of Froud is an album of illustrations by the Chagford-based artist and illustrator Brian Froud. I found it in my local bookshop in Brighton in the autumn of 1979 and knew at once that I had to have it, even though it cost a whopping £3.95 (which was a lot of pocket-money in those days). It starts with a short essay about Froud’s work, and then devotes dozens of full-colour plates to the work itself – wonderful pictures of goblins and trolls, fairies and questing knights, all painted in subtle, autumnal tones and inhabiting a twilit fantasy world of twisty woods and mossy stones which is basically Dartmoor filtered through the Froud imagination. I was thirteen when I found it; I loved fantasy and I loved Dartmoor, and these images seemed to capture something that I’d always been looking for. I pretty quickly decided that I, too, would be an illustrator and live on Dartmoor. It took me nearly thirty years to get there, but I did it in the end, and  it was entirely because of that book. And when I left illustration behind to become a full time writer, it was one of the main sources of inspiration for my Goblins series of comic fantasy novels.

I still love to take The Land of Froud down from the bookcase and look through it on autumn evenings (it’s the sort of book that goes best with dark evenings and crackling fires). It’s long out-of-print and rather a rarity nowadays, but plenty of other Froud books are available, including Faeries, his collaboration with fellow Chagford artist Alan Lee. (You may already be familiar with his work from films Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, which he designed.)

Philip lives on Dartmoor with his wife and son.

Philip Reeve trained as an illustrator, and worked for many years providing cartoons and illustrations for the Horrible Histories and Murderous Maths books. His first novel, the epic Mortal Engines, was published in 2001. It went on to win the Smarties and Blue Peter prizes, and the movie is currently in production. It was followed by three sequels – Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain – and three prequels; Fever Crumb, A Web of Air, and Scrivener’s Moon. Here Lies Arthur, his take on the Arthurian legends, won the Carnegie Medal, and he is also the author of the Goblins trilogy of comic fantasy stories and the space fantasy Larklight (illustrated by David Wyatt). In 2013 he joined forces with illustrator Sarah McIntyre to create Oliver and the Seawigs, the first in a series of funny, highly-illustrated adventure stories which continued with Cakes in Space, Pugs of the Frozen North, Jinks and O’Hare Funfair Repair and the activity book Pug-A-Doodle-Do.  Their next book together, Roly Poly Flying Pony: The Legend of Kevin, will be released in September 2018. Philip returned to older fiction in 2015 with RAILHEAD, a critically acclaimed adventure set in a future populated by thieves and androids, exiles and emperors, insects and intelligent trains. The sequel, Black Light Express, was published in 2016, and the story concludes in Station Zero (2018).

Photo credit: Sarah McIntyre