https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/10/george-alagiah-steinbeck-taught-me-the-power-of-words

The television presenter and author on Graham Greene, Germaine Greer and reading poetry during chemotherapy

The book I’m currently reading
I’m having chemotherapy at the moment and I find it difficult to concentrate. When I read, it has to be in short bursts. I’ve got Ben Okri’s compilation of poetry, Rise Like Lions, by my bedside. He groups the poems into categories, such as “protest” and “truth”. In the former is William Wordsworth’s tribute to the man who led the most successful slave revolt, in Haiti, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”; in the latter is Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”.

The book that changed my life
Reading The Grapes of Wrath as a teenager made me think of journalism as a career. Steinbeck’s powerful evocation of the injustices visited on the Joad family taught me the power of words.