The artist Tacita Dean describes how "Fires" by Marguerite Yourcenar changed her life and art. She discovered the book of prose poems as an undergraduate. "Somehow, her pithy and uncompromising language appealed to me, and my own love tragedy," she says. Yourcenar's work helped her find her voice as a feminist, writer and film-maker. "She gave a female voice to my passionate and romantic younger self who was trying to find an artistic context for the desire I had to reach out and touch the classical past."

Producer: Smita Patel.