The most outwardly apparent influence on my own novel was Walter de la Mare’s enigmatic thirty-six-line poem ‘The Listeners’, which gave me the title, as well as a template for my own book’s atmosphere of strange solitude and its key location: a dilapidated cottage among the trees being gradually subsumed by the unrelenting forces of nature and time, and in which young William Abrehart explores.

I’ve just been going through some of my images and here are a few that I think capture something of the dreamlike qualities that pervades De la Mare’s poetry and short stories.