Jack Edward's Book Recommendations

The wonderful thing about having a backstage pass to the Green Room at the Hay Festival is that you are never entirely sure who you might run into. When James (James Paxton Priestley, Editor-in-Chief of GossamerWight Literary Magazine) and I whizzed off to Hay two years ago for a two-day book fest (wow, where did the time go to!) we shared our space with Tony Robinson, Ruby Wax, Richard E. Grant, and Helena Bonham Carter, to name but a few (yes, I am shamelessly name-dropping!)–although we never got to meet Margaret Atwood, as we needed to leave early. However, we did get to meet and interview Jack Edwards, who was at Hay that week interviewing several authors.

Who is Jack Edwards?

In a nutshell, Jack is a twenty-six-year-old English YouTuber (24 when we meet up with him). If you query Wikipedia, it will tell you that,

'Jack Benjamin Edwards is an English YouTuber, social media influencer and author. He has built an online following posting videos about books, popular culture and university life since 2016, and is associated with the internet sub-communities of BookTube, BookTok and EduTube. As of July 2024 he has over 1.38 million subscribers on YouTube and over 1.1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram.'

If truth be known, we (that is, I) ambushed Jack in the Green Room at Hay. As he and I sat chatting about all things books, James and I quietly (and deftly) set up our recording equipment, ready to spring a surprise interview with Jack. Although I am the in-house photography/videography/podcasting specialist for GossamerWight Literary Magazine, James took over camera responsibilities for the interview, leaving me free to focus on fostering my rapport with Jack. Without a doubt, all three of us had a marvellous time.

I selected this video interview with Jack to kick-start the Multimedia category on GossamerWight. Although I did not focus my interview with Jack specifically on books that needed to fit hand-in-glove with the interests of this website, many of Jack's recommendations were on target. You can spot some in this running order of books Jack and I mentioned:

• The Hunger Games (Hunger Games Trilogy). (Suzanne Collins).
• 1984 (George Orwell).
• We (Yevgeny Zamyatin).
• Brave New World (Aldous Huxley).
• The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood).
• Misery (Stephen King).
• The Housekeeper and the Professor (Yoko Ogawa).
• We Can Do Better Than This (Amelia Abraham).
• Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (R.F. Kuang).
• Love in the Big City (Sang Young Park)–translated into English for Jack by his friend, Anton. Now, that's what I call friendship!

Jack's favourite books (according to his website) are: The Handmaid's Tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, A Study in Scarlet, Lolita, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Frankenstein.

This video first appeared on The Shai Creative on YouTube.

Video outro music:

Jack's website.

[Header image credit: The Hay Festival site, 2023. A press and media image courtesy of Hay Festival. ©2023-2025].