They say that to be a writer, one also has to be a reader. No one can be an artist without inspiration, and really, there is no better way to become a better artist than by engaging with the work of others, whether that be peers or icons. Chrissie Hynde knows that well, as she’s a self-professed bookworm, often allowing literary influence to float into her work.

While Hynde is one of the best-known faces and voices in the world of rock, first found buzzing around the punk scene with the Sex Pistols in the mid-to-late 1970s, her lyricism has always been imbued with far more intellect than the average anthem. She’s never been shy about having a clear poetic streak, even in her biggest, most crowd-pleasing hits.

Her engagement with reading and writing as mediums and her love for art forms beyond the stage was shown in her 2015 memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. As she traced her life from being a creative young kid desperate for some form of output to becoming one of the most respected names in the music world, her love for words in all forms holds true as one of the brightest and most important sparks in her life.

As she shared her life’s reading list with Radical Reads, she spoke about the vital influence of one writer in particular: John Banville. It’s no light praise at all as she declares him to be “one of the greatest novelists alive”. The Irish novelist had his first book, Nightspawn, published in 1971 and has gone on to be an incredibly prolific contemporary writer, both as an author and also as a literary critic and reviewer.

For Hynde, her favourite of his works naturally draws a line of connection to her other big love: music. Of his 2015 novel The Blue Guitar, the musician said, “I like to think he wrote this one expressly for me — blue guitar and all”. As she plays her own signature blue guitar in the form of an iced blue Fender Telecaster released in her honour as part of the brand’s artist series, it’s easy to see why this work struck a chord with her.

“It doesn’t have the slightest reference to me, and I am delusional,” she admits, but that didn’t stop her from engaging with the book on a deep level of both total enjoyment and unlimited inspiration. It was a novel she poured over as she said, “I take ages reading Banville, as I reread every other sentence to savour his incredible constructions of text”.

The entirety of Hynde’s reading list could serve as an absolute education in left-field classics. Alongside Banville, she picks out works like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the first African novel to be translated into English. She also declares Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story, to be “another masterpiece by a master”.

But still, no one can hold a candle to Banville as she said, “Nobody can touch him, in my opinion”.