From petty crime to university lecturer: ‘Power of the word changed my life’

Not just one book, anyway. Try nearly 10,000 of them. Because books changed his life after discovering the power of learning many years after leaving school with next to no qualifications.

“I didn’t have a great start in life,” he says. “I did really badly at school and came from a turbulent family background. I had so many U’s on my exams that my mark sheet was like a list of Disney movies.

“The first time around I stopped going to school for many reasons. I was very disenchanted with the world. I was a gay kid when it was really not good to be a gay kid, just as AIDS was ramping up and there was rampant homophobia in the Press. I’d literally read the headlines in the chip paper as I was finishing my chips.

“It meant that I didn’t really go to school and so I got bored and I went robbing shops. It was at the weaselly end of petty crime – no one got hurt. I occasionally sold LPs to buy fags, but I didn’t turn it into a cottage industry or anything.”

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Vybarr drifted to the south coast and the seaside resort of Brighton where he moved in with his then boyfriend. It was there, while he worked out what he wanted to do with his life, that he was introduced to a passion that would change everything.

“I came out when I was 20 to my family and friends which seems quite late now but wasn’t for the time. I’d moved away and moved in with someone and within a couple of weeks one of his friends came to visit. She had a temp job in a publishing house and she brought a couple of books with her as a welcome gift,” he says.

“It’s not coincidence that for the first time in my life I was properly settled. I was out and didn’t have to use loads of mental bandwidth being closeted. The book was a bit boring to start with but I had lots of time to fill and I just carried on reading and the two books turned out to be related in an interesting and creative way but I was electrified by the story – it shook me.

“At the end of this book – The Innocent by Ian McEwan – there was a twist and I dropped it in shock. I was blown away – I had no idea that books could be as good as this. That was it. I knew my life had changed. I knew I had found something precious and that I couldn’t waste it on reading the wrong things as I was worried it would put me off.

“So I did something that I have never done before and I asked for help. I spoke to the girl who worked at the publishers and I also found a book shop in Brighton who were very helpful. I was reading as I walked down the street, I was reading on the bus, I was reading while my tea bag was brewing… I became completely obsessed.”

Literary fiction was the main genre but he would read anything from Kazuo Ishiguro to Ruth Rendall.

He said: “I read everything I was given. I was frightened of classics – they seemed to use a whole lot of words to not say very much.

“I was immediately aware there were lots of words that were in not in my vocabulary so I would write them down and the definition and carry a piece of paper around with me with the words on.

“I’d been into stuff before but they’d never lasted whereas this did. I knew I had discovered something precious and wondered where it would take me.”

Where it took him was back into education and now as author of ‘We Are What We Read – A Life Within and Without Books’ a book which weaves Vybarr’s own life in books with a spirited history of the war on the humanities, uncovering the impact that books have in shaping our reality at a time when their value is under attack from governments around the world.

“I was always interested in stories – I was a big film watcher – but books never really made it onto the scene,” he explained. “My book starts with me reading ‘For from the Maddening Crowd’ which is a GCSE set text and I read it when I was main redundant, I had been set it at school but I didn’t get it at all.

“I started studying afterwards, which took a couple of years. When I went back to studying I found it easy – not the studying but the sticking to it. I was really hungry, I had discovered a whole world of stuff that I didn’t know anything about and I was desperate to know more.

“I was selling bus tickets in Brighton when I started. People thought I was really disciplined to do an Open University course but I wasn’t disciplined, I just wanted to do it. I wanted to push myself – I guess that’s what discipline means.

“If someone had said I’d be a university professor I would have said no chance. I just wanted to get over the next fence.”

After a year doing an arts foundation course with the Open University Vybarr went full time at Sussex University to study English and Philosophy. His first report from a lecturer said “I was the best read student she’d ever taught and she’d taught Martin Amiss!”.

A Masters, PhD then a research fellowship followed and 10 years later he was lecturing at University of Kent before moving back north with husband Adam to his current role at York St John’s.

He said: “Having missed the opportunities you value them so much more. It’s like you’re been drawn back in a catapult to fire yourself forward. I’ve read nearly 10,000 books, I could get through two a day when I was really at it. Reading and education rescued me, it changed my life.”

We Are What We Read by Vybarr Cregan-Reid, published by Biteback £20.