Years later, when I started to write myself, I returned again and again to that feeling the book gave me when I first read it: that strange mix of the magical and the commonplace which, in Holdstock's book, sat together in real harmony. Wherever I found myself living, my copy always found its way to the front of my bookshelf. Mythago Wood was one of those books that has stayed with me, emotionally and physically. Heroic kings and brave outlaws, forest spirits and beautiful noblewomen: we see King Arthur and Robin Hood and Boudicca in them (although Holdstock's characters amount to far more than the sum of their folklore parts). Mythago Wood is a very British book, drawing on Celtic myth and English folklore, re-presenting the huge tapestry of these islands' stories as the titular woodland populated by 'mythagos' – templates for all the figures of our myths and legend, or perhaps the distilled essences of them. To read Holdstock's prose is to be drawn into the depths of the forest that is central to his concept, at times beautiful and otherworldly, but also dark and dangerous. I returned to Mythago Wood just a couple of months ago, and the novel had lost none of its power. He rightly won the World Fantasy Award for Mythago Wood in 1985, the year after UK publication a quarter of a century on it remains a much-loved and critically acclaimed book – one of those rare beasts in the fantasy world: an enduring classic. Holdstock was born in 1948 in Kent, and his childhood ramblings over Romney Marsh and the nearby woodlands evidently informed his later masterpiece and its sequels. Perhaps the 1940s setting of Mythago Wood had made me think the novel had come from an earlier time.

I was surprised to learn, not so long ago, that Holdstock was so young – still in his early 30s when the book first appeared.

By setting the 'contemporary' aspect of the book in the years after the second world war, Holdstock successfully splices the ancient and the modern: the modern characters, weary and wounded from a technological global conflict, find a hidden corner of something old and magical buried in the garden of the country they had been fighting to defend. Mythago Wood transports us back to an age when Britain still had genuinely wild places.

Mythago wood