Colum McCann: Why I love Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Willy Wonka
Colum McCann is author of such novels as Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin.
Picture: Fergal Phillips
My father, Sean McCann, was a professional soccer player, a goalkeeper. He played in England for Charlton Athletic. After coming back to Dublin after his failed soccer career, he was a features editor in the Evening Press and he wrote kids’ soccer books. The seminal one for me was a book called Goals for Glory, the first in a series of eight. I'll never forget my teacher in school, Mr Kells, reading the book aloud to us on a series of four Fridays if we behaved ourselves and the magic of that moment: this was created in my father's writing shed and now it was alive there in front of me. I was also his editor on it in a way because he passed the pages to me to read as he wrote them.
