Gavin James Bower on his favourite author

I fell in love with a bearded German in my second year of university.

I know everyone experiments as a student, but this was a bit extreme - I'm sure you'll agree. Most people pop a few pills and get off with a housemate. Not good enough for me, it seemed. No, I was proper hardcore. I was radical, even. I was…a socialist. I still am, I suppose, if I had to subscribe to any one 'ism'. And I have Karl Marx to thank for that.

Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were what really did it. The first book in which the philosopher attempted to synthesise - apt, given his conclusion - his views on political economy, capital and society. It was an exercise in self-clarification, which, for any young thinker - student or otherwise - is pretty sexy, you've got to admit.

I've still got the copy I used to read on trips between the University of Sheffield and home, complete with my notes in the margins. Incredibly, I'm not embarrassed by them. Passages from Marx on what he termed 'estranged labour' - '…the object which labour produces - labour's product - confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer' - are underlined and asterisked. Other passages, on the abolition of private property, for instance, are met with scribbles in the margins: 'Man transcends private property - he thus transcends all estrangement…'

Marx's exercise in self-clarification was, for the 20-year-old me, an exercise in self-avowal. As a writer or thinker (read: opinionated git), this was my first attempt at writing down just what I believed in, and what I did not; what I was for, and what I was against.

It was the most exciting time in my reading life up until then, and the first time I'd set out in my mind a way to approach the world, pen in hand, principles at the ready.

I'm 27 now, with one novel under my belt. I often get asked about the influence of fiction on my writing - specifically, a type of fiction, and a type of author - but I know what really gets me going. What makes me write. What makes me tell stories. And it's to change people's minds. But there's something a bit, well, unsexy about Karl Marx, which seems to put people off and prevent them from wanting to play up his influence; at least, when it comes to my writing.

I suppose there's only one thing for it, really. Synthesise my views. Shout them from the rooftops. Oh, and grow a nice, big, beard.

Gavin James Bower is the author of Dazed and Aroused (Quartet Books)