David Almond

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is the writer David Almond. Most of his work is for children, but the adults who populate the juries of heavyweight literary prizes really like it too. The accolades began with his first novel, Skellig, published in 1998, when he was forty-seven. It won the Weighty Whit Red Children's Award, and then many others besides. Ever since, he's been acclaimed for his ability to craft complex, philosophical narratives with strikingly down-to-earth characterisations. He grew up on Tyneside in a big Catholic family, and the influences of his childhood feature heavily in his stories. He says Each of my books has had to be written. There was something that had to come out. And I'm wondering in that phrase, David Armand, whether that means there is a sort of catharsis when you write.

David Almond1:24

I think there is some kind of catharsis. I think if you're driven to write, it's because there's something inside you that's driven to be written, that wants to get out and to be written. So I know I'm writing well when I feel I'm writing from some kind of need, that there's an urgency to get something out. It's almost like I'm not inventing something, but that something is kind of weirdly inventing me or inventing itself on the paper in front of me.

Presenter1:45

And what about the age I mentioned just there? You were forty seven when this first big book, Skellig, was published a great acclaim. You had been writing at that point for two decades. Did it come as something of a relief?

David Almond1:58

Yeah, I'd been writing forever and uh when Scali came out I waited for the reviews that said here's this new writer and then the review that said overnight success and I said yeah and it's only taken twenty years

Presenter2:07

Yeah.

David Almond2:07

So it did come as a kind of relief. But also there's part of me that didn't care, and I think that's important. There's got to be a part of it that really doesn't give a damn. There's another part that thinks I'm the best thing that's ever happened and waits for a claim. But the central thing just does the work.

Presenter2:21

The fact that each of your books had to be written in, do you think if you'd never been published and never met with the considerable success you have, you'd still be at home writing whilst you were working, doing something else to pay the bills?

David Almond2:31

Oh, absolutely. And you know, for those two decades before Skelly came out, I was a part time teacher. But also I was writing and I made nothing from it. And I had a, you know, an audience of about twenty five people who thought I was really good, and that was fine.

Presenter2:31

Yeah.

Presenter2:44

And when you walk into a room now, I mean, you came in today to our control room here in the studio, you know, and a variety of your books were lying around the room. Do you still get a little thrill when you see your books populating the world?

David Almond2:53

Populating the world. It's great to walk in anyway and see books with my name on.'Cause what a writer wants is to get their work out into the world. It stops being them and it goes away and becomes something else for other people.

Presenter3:04

Let's go to the music. Tell me about your first one of the morning then. What what is it?

David Almond3:07

This is from L'Offeo by Mondeverdi, who had discovered when I was

David Almond3:12

A late teenager, I think, going to the library in Gateside. I had a fantastic stock of L P's at the time, and I just loved Montevedi. I loved this passage from L'Ofeo. It's when Orpheus is going down into the underworld to find his lost Eurydici, and he has to persuade Sharon to let him through. So how does he do it? By singing beautifully.

Speaker 33:29

For Saint Is

Speaker 33:57

Sends a fool.

Speaker 34:00

We forbas a joy.

Speaker 34:18

Ah, sure.

Speaker 34:25

Meanwhile

Presenter4:28

Possente Spiuto from L'Orfeo by Monteverde, performed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson and the English Baroque Soloist, conducted there by John Elliott Gardner. So, David Ammond, um, writing for children. People can get a bit touchy about it, because of course we don't regard things that are written for children as highly as we regard things that are written for grown-ups.

David Almond4:49

That's right. For years I thought, Oh, I'm an intelligent, educated adult, so I should be writing books for intelligent, educated adults. And it was kind of ambushed by this children's book Skellic. And as soon as I began to write it down, I just felt liberated. I thought, Oh, yeah, you know, there is this new world in which I can write. And books that are written, you know, apparently for children are works of art.

Presenter5:01

But oh yeah

David Almond5:11

And it's also, you know, where else is our culture going to be regenerated except through young people and through art for young people?

Presenter5:17

You've said that you didn't want to be known as a Northern writer.

David Almond5:20

If you grew up in the north as I did, and you say, I'm a writer.

David Almond5:24

in that kind of accent and people saying, Oh, I know what you write about, you know, and they kind of try to categorise you immediately. And so I spent a long time trying not to be a Northern writer, to write about something that I kind of knew nothing about. And it was only when I turned back and allowed myself to write with Northern rhythms and about Northern culture and to draw on the fantastic kind of landscape and character of the North that I became a b a better writer.

Presenter5:49

For many years, how you earned your living was as a teacher. You've been very forthright in your views about education. You're talking a lot about the restrictiveness of the curriculum and things that are driven by outcomes, just not being.

David Almond5:56

The curriculum and things.

Presenter6:00

Conducive to a proper thora education for children.

David Almond6:03

I think there's always a conflict in education between the need for creativity and the need for kind of mechanical structures. And I think often the swing goes back the wrong way. It becomes just too mechanistic and too formulaic. I think we're going through a period like that now. But at the heart of it is children and teachers. And I think, you know, children and teachers themselves are creative beings who can't be confined. It was interesting when I wrote Skellig, I found myself writing about education. And Mina in Skellig quotes William Blake, How can a bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing? which is such a great line. And I think if we try to constrict people too much, we'll stop them learning.

Presenter6:41

You got into it was a sort of minor dust up with the then Education Secretary, David Blanco. Were you surprised that that suddenly you were looked upon as somebody who who had a point of view that wasn't helpful to education?

David Almond6:52

It was, on the one hand, it was really surprising because I said 10% of the curriculum needs to be just left as kind of space, as dream time, which seemed to me quite a sensible kind of proposal. And I was attacked, and it said that this is a free-for-all, anything-goes kind of philosophy, which will destroy a whole generation of children. And I thought, this is bungus. You know, how can people believe this? I'd been a teacher by that time for 20 years. I'd just won the major children's book prize in this country, and the only way they could take me seriously was by attacking me, by kicking out at me. I think there's this fear in English education, especially when it becomes attached to politics, of feeling soft.

David Almond7:29

Yeah, the thing it's really soft and it's not. You know, it's like the way I write my books appears to be free for all anything goes, because at the beginning it is. But I'm incredibly disciplined. I have a really tight routine. I work really hard. This is how things are made, by a kind of a match of playfulness and discipline.

Presenter7:45

Let's have your second disc of the morning. Tell me about this.

David Almond7:49

This is oh, Dorriste. When I think back to my childhood when I was five, six, seven, the voice I hear is Dorriste. I grew up in a little pebble dashed estate in Felling, and um I can hear Dorris singing The Black Hills of Dakota.

Speaker 38:02

Take me back to the Black Hills, The Black Hills of Dakota.

Speaker 38:12

To the beautiful Indian country.

Speaker 38:17

That I lost Lost my heart in the black hills, The Black Hills of Dakota.

Presenter8:29

Who's up?

Presenter8:32

The Black Hills of Dakota sung there by Doris Day, of course. And so this pebble dash that you were born into then, you were one of six. Could only have been a big lively household with six kids.

David Almond8:42

Yeah, it was a small house, but um there were several of us in there. And it was a a newly built um pebble dashed estate down at the bottom of Felling. We'd moved there from a an upstairs Tyneside flat, which was riddled with mice and had a toilet in the backyard, things like that.

Presenter8:56

So it felt like progress. That was a nice thing to move to a new estate that had better facilities, wasn't it?

David Almond8:59

It was because things were being built. It was, you know, s not long after the war and I remember a great sense of optimism. I know my dad, you know, my dad said you can be anything, you can do absolutely anything, you kids.

Presenter9:10

Your father had fought in Burma. Did he ever talk to you about that?

David Almond9:13

He didn't much. Um he died when I was very young. He died when I was fifteen. We we never really had a good conversation about Burma. He seemed not to want to talk about it, which I think was typical of a lot of people who went there.

Presenter9:23

Yes. And what about your mother, then?

David Almond9:25

From a very young age my mum had terrible arthritis, so all the time I remember she was very damaged by this awful disease, you know, her fingers, her hands, her knees, her joints. But she had this incredible spirit and joy, you know, she was a very joyful, happy woman.

Presenter9:41

And you say your father died when you were fifteen, and you were one of six. That's a very difficult set of circumstances.

David Almond9:47

If you think about it afterwards, I mean, my baby sister died when I was very young and um and then my dad died. Two of my sisters were very small, two and three at the time. And my mum brought us up and weirdly I didn't think about it until I was in my twenties. Look what she did

David Almond10:02

How did she manage to do that?

Presenter10:03

Yes. W it was your little sister who died?

David Almond10:05

My little sister, yeah, she died when I was seven. When she was one, she'd had a bad chest arm, as lots of kids did then, and I'm sure maybe these days she would have been fine.

Presenter10:14

And what do you remember about that time?

David Almond10:16

Um it was terrible,'cause we were there, you know, there were three of us there when Barbara she didn't wake up one morning and um we saw Barbara in my mum's arms and um it was just it was it was like hell. It was like hell in this little house for that morning.

Presenter10:32

Most people are lucky enough not to touch those sort of tragedies in their life, and I'm wondering when you went on to have your own daughter, did did that have a feel a a sense of vulnerability about it because you'd witnessed something as as sad as that?

David Almond10:45

With her I didn't but I think what it does do if you sort of lose people when you're very young is that it makes the whole world seem very fragile.

Presenter10:53

At the centre of Skellig is the the story of this little baby who's very vulnerable and who has a heart condition and is in and out of hospital and at one point you know things are looking very, very bad indeed. Did that feel like you were writing it out, like you were writing about Barbara when you were able to to put down something as as as intimate as that in your book?

David Almond11:12

I couldn't allow myself to think too much about that. Because I think if I'd thought too much about it, then it would have directed me into different kind of emotional impact and said, Oh, it's terrible, isn't it terrible, isn't it terrible? Whereas as a writer, you have to distance yourself from your material, no matter how personal it is. So you distance yourself, you make it into something

David Almond11:32

Uh you know, you try to make it into something beautiful, into a a work of art.

Presenter11:36

Is there any sense in which you are cautious about exploiting something that you know that that was not just your experience, of course, it was the experience of your entire family, of your brothers and sisters, of your mother?

David Almond11:46

Absolutely, and that gives you a kind of responsibility to the material that you're not just going to u to exploit it. So you have to use it in a way that honors the experience and also honors the other people who are attached to the experience as well.

Presenter11:59

Let's have some music then, uh, David Ramond, what are we gonna hear now?

David Almond12:03

La Buene was the first opera that I ever saw on stage. I think it's a great way to start watching opera'cause it was just so fantastic. And especially this first section when Rodolfo and Mimi are falling in love. It's just beautiful, beautiful music.

Speaker 312:18

So

Speaker 313:04

That's a straight line.

Presenter13:17

O Suavi van Schuler from La Bohm by Puccini, performed there by Lucianio Pavarosi, and Mirella Freyne, and the Berliner Philharmonica conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

Presenter13:26

So, then, David Almond, you were a voracious reader. What did you enjoy as a youngster?

David Almond13:31

I liked myths and legends, and I mean I remember one book in particular, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, in a fantastic version by Roger Lancelin Greene, and um I can remember the feel of the book, what the cover looked like, and I remember how it cracked as it got older.

Presenter13:45

And you used you started writing young, as as a lot of writers do. I I read that you stitched what you wrote into books. Explain that to me, I don't understand.

David Almond13:52

I used to write.

David Almond13:54

Stories on paper and then stitch the spines with, you know.

Presenter13:58

I see you making your own books.

David Almond13:58

I see.

David Almond14:00

Making them my own books. Yeah.

Presenter14:02

And did you show your mum what you were writing when you were little?

David Almond14:05

I think I did, yes, uh-huh, yeah. Um

Presenter14:05

Thing a

David Almond14:08

And I don't know what happened to all of the stories now. Maybe they're all in somebody's attic somewhere.

Presenter14:12

And you said that your dad in this rather democratic environment that you moved to as a as a young family said to you, you know, you can do anything. You can be anything in this big world.

David Almond14:19

Yeah.

Presenter14:21

Did you have the courage to think in this big world I can be a writer?

David Almond14:25

I did, and I think his kind of statements like that really helped me. We had a tramp who lived in our town, and I used to really admire the tramp, because he used to live at the top of the town. And I remember saying to my dad one day, I'd love to be a tramp like him and he said, Yes, that'll be fine, son, but just get educated first.

Presenter14:41

Yeah, but here's a funny thing. You didn't really secondary school didn't really particularly work out for you, or at least not you didn't en enjoy it very much.

David Almond14:48

I didn't enjoy it. I didn't like secondary school. By the time I was about twelve, thirteen, I suppose I became a kind of standard, you know, disaffected, apparently uninterested teenager. But I was reading voraciously at the library. We had a fantastic library. But school seemed distant and

David Almond15:03

When people say now how good schools were in the past, I want to take them back and say, well, okay, come back to some of my lessons that I had in the sixties. I think schools and teachers now are eons ahead of how they were when I was at school.

Presenter15:16

And that, of course, was at that crucial point in the sixties when everything w was changing. Do you think also that had an influence, that the teachers were from that sort of post war generation? Maybe some of them even had fought and gone through the war, and there you were.

Presenter15:29

Imagining a very different future that was very much motivated by your own self-fulfilment rather than duty and being buttoned up.

David Almond15:36

Oh, I think that's right. You know, we had a lot of stuff about moral fibre in school and and in a sense everybody was a victim of this. Yes, a lot of the teachers had gone through war, you know, they'd retrained to become teachers and um so they were kind of struggling and then they had these kids in the s sixties who were aspiring to great things and uh becoming hippies and uh well it was difficult to be a hippie in hindsight.

Presenter15:56

It was too cold to wander.

David Almond15:58

It was too cool to wander about.

Presenter16:01

Let's have some more music then. What are we gonna hear now, David?

David Almond16:03

We used to go every Monday and Thursday to the Oxford Ballroom in Newcastle and listen to Tamla. Tamla Motown was just fantastic to us. And this was the great Tamla breakthrough moment for me. It was a reach out by the Portops.

Speaker 316:19

With the land that will shelter you

Speaker 316:28

Well let me see you boom.

Speaker 316:33

When you feel lost and about to give up

Speaker 316:37

Cause your best just ain't good enough. And you feel the world has found it.

Presenter16:45

That was a reach out by the four tops. So David Ammond, you went to university, the first in your family, but not the last. And then you decided that initially you were going to teach. What was it about teaching that attracted you?

David Almond16:57

When I left university I thought what am I gonna I want to write, what am I gonna do? So I thought a teacher, what a great job for a writer, because you get six weeks holiday. I'll write during that time. So I trained to be a teacher, I did a P G C and then became a teacher and of course I was so exhausted by teaching that I wrote nothing for two years. And also became fascinated by teaching and I worked in a little primary school in Gateshead and was fascinated by it and loved it really.

Presenter17:21

You say that for two years you didn't write anything. When did you pick the writing back up again? When did you find the time?

David Almond17:26

I'd been writing fragments, and then I kind of muscled down and began to write seriously again and um began to write short stories, began to get my first stories published as I was teaching in that first sort of five years of teaching.

Presenter17:38

There was a sort of crossroads crunch time in your life. You were newly divorced. You had been teaching for an amount of time and doing enough writing and writing short stories, but it seemed it wasn't enough. You you sort of threw it all in. What what happened?

David Almond17:46

Yeah.

David Almond17:51

That's right. And I'd been teaching for these years. I'd been married, that had fallen. And I remember vividly I opened The Guardian one morning on a Monday morning, and there was a tiny little advert and it said, Do you have a talent that you would like to pursue? Would you like to live in a mansion in East Angle and help to rebuild the mansion and pursue your own art?

David Almond18:08

And I went straight to the staff telephone, phoned the number that was there, and said, Yes, I would love to do that.

Presenter18:14

What year was that, then?

David Almond18:15

This was nineteen eighty two.

Presenter18:16

Yeah.

Presenter18:16

Yeah.

David Almond18:17

I went to live in this kind of commune up towards the coast of Norfolk, it was a dilapidated mansion.

Presenter18:22

Having read your work, there are a lot of Blakey and William Blake references in there, and we know that he is often associated with the idea of the beginnings of that sort of free love. And I'm thinking.

David Almond18:27

Mm.

David Almond18:31

But I'm thinking

Presenter18:31

Was it a free love commune?

David Almond18:33

It wasn't that kind of freeloved commune. I was wasn't in fact it was owned. His wife was an American artist, so she had this idea of a colony of artists living together and would work towards some common purpose. The common purpose was to rebuild the house.

Presenter18:47

So it's a free labour commune then of course.

David Almond18:48

So we worked three days a week for the house and then had four days. So there were artists, writers, potters, musicians.

Presenter18:52

Uh

David Almond18:57

It was magical. It was an intense experience for us all. And it was a year that seemed to last for about seven years because so much happened. It was so great.

Presenter19:06

That is it.

David Almond19:06

Change you.

David Almond19:08

It changed me because it gave me again that sense of possibility. It was like a year of dream time inside my own life when I really began to write well, when I began to open up. Maybe I became a bit of the hippie that I couldn't be in tight tight in the sixties. And I met my partner Sarah Jane there, we fell in love, and it was just it was a great, great time. We had no money, hardly anything at all.

Presenter19:29

Yes, how did you survive? I mean, how did you buy food?

David Almond19:31

Well, before I'd gone I sold the house, so I used that money to last for

David Almond19:36

A year and a half.

Presenter19:37

Yeah.

David Almond19:38

I think I had about thirteen hundred pounds.

Presenter19:41

And did it work, the Commune? I mean, did people exchanging their labor for the time to be creative and try to try to live out their creative dreams, did that all shake down well?

David Almond19:51

It worked for that year, but I think if you're gonna

David Almond19:55

Rebuild a seventeenth-century mansion, it's probably not a great idea to have writers and musicians putting the roof on.

Presenter20:03

Let's have some more music then, David. What are we going to hear now? We're on your fifth of the morning.

David Almond20:07

This is The Adachio for Strings by Samuel Barber, and this is the soundtrack of Gunthorpe, which is where we were at North Norfolk. I can just hear this and I see the the summer in that hall, see the big gardens, the lake, the forest, and cycling up towards the sea, and just having a lovely time.

Presenter21:23

The Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. So, David Amond, you left the commune and you left it with your new love. Did you feel a sense of a sort of trepidation that you could go out into the world and actually survive it together?

David Almond21:40

I guess so, but also, you know, we needed we needed money. We had no money. And uh we went to live in a a farmhouse in Suffolk for a very cold winter and lived on the dual, so we were on the dual for a while, and then came back to the northeast and um I ended up going back into teaching to earn some money, but with this increased drive to write and to keep on writing and this was now pushing forward very strongly.

Presenter21:42

Uh

Presenter22:03

You wrote a a collection of short stories called Counting Stars around about that time. You've described that as a breakthrough. Why?

David Almond22:08

Weirdly, I began writing Counting Stars when I was in that farmhouse in Suffolk, and I wrote a story called Where Your Wings Were, which was about Barbara, about my sister.

David Almond22:18

And I read it now. I hated it because it seemed too kind of sentimental and too personal to me. So I put it away in a drawer and wrote other things. And then I took it out of the drawer again. And it just generated this whole series of stories called Counting Stars, which drew on my own childhood. And it was the first time I kind of turned back and said, Oh, oh, right, I'm from the North, I'm a Catholic, and just allowed those things into my work. And as soon as I allowed them to really influence me, there was a whole kind of font of rhythm and imagery and character and language that I could draw on that I allowed to influence my work. And the first time I did it was in Counting Stars.

Presenter22:56

Um we've talked a lot about Skelling. It is a highly emotional book. What were you like when you were writing it?

David Almond23:03

With Skellig it did seem to write itself it was weird.

David Almond23:07

And at times I almost had to write it sort of from the side of my eye. You know, I couldn't look at it too closely. So I almost had to just not ignore it, but just allow it to happen there. It was such a strange book to write,

Presenter23:21

Has that happened with other I mean, you've written many, many other books that have been very successful too. Has that has that happened with them or with that?

David Almond23:24

Thanks, exactly.

David Almond23:26

Not to the same extent. Skalig, the whole of Skellig, was like that.

Presenter23:30

Now it is a book with a that that that toys with spirituality, that looks at it with that kind of sideways glance. I don't want to get too airy, Fairy, but did you at times wonder if somebody was working through you? Did you sometimes feel that there was a spirit that had a lot to do with the writing of that book?

David Almond23:46

Well, I kind of couldn't believe that, because I don't believe that, but it felt like that, and also it also it felt more like I'd entered a space where this stuff was happening anyway, and I was allowed access to it for a time. And it sounds madly mystical, but it's not. There is a sense that when you're writing well, and it also came when I began to write for children, that there's a kind of world of myth and story which is kind of just beside us, and at times you're kind of allowed access to it.

Presenter24:19

Let's have some more music. What are we gonna hear now?

David Almond24:22

We're now having um oh, this is the opera of Skellig. Um

David Almond24:26

Skellig became a play and it was a radio play and there were moves to make it into a movie and then Todd Markova, the American composer, came and said, How about if we made an opera of Scalig? and it seemed just so perfect for me.

Presenter24:37

And you wrote the libretto.

David Almond24:38

I wrote the lipretta.

Presenter24:39

And how was that how did you know what to do?

David Almond24:41

I didn't,'cause I remember sitting across the table from Todd and he said, David, I'd like you to let write the libretto as well. And I took a deep breath and I said, Yes, of course I can do that, Todd.

Speaker 324:57

Fost from earth.

Speaker 325:02

Please Kelly, please Kelly

Speaker 325:09

Skelly, you're beautiful.

Speaker 325:16

My makes one

Presenter25:22

Part of Skellig the Opera, written by Todd Macover and My Castaway, David Almond, performed there by Matthew Long, Merin Lezan, and Omar Ibrahim, with the Northern Symphonia recorded at The Sage in Gateshead. We've talked a lot then, David Almond, about 1998 being a significant year for you, what with the huge success of Skellig, but actually, the most important thing that happened to you that year is that your only daughter was born. Freya came into your life. Tell me about that.

David Almond25:48

It was wonderful. Um and she was born

David Almond25:51

I think about five months before Skellig was published and Skellig was waiting on the um on the printing machines ready to go, but they were just waiting for the dedication. So one of the first jobs I had when Freya was born and named that I had to phone the publishers up and say, Well, she's called Freya Grace, so this can be the dedication to Freya Grace.

Presenter26:09

And having your own child and and writing for a younger audience are are the you know, the two things must surely be related. You must have looked throughout the years at how she responds to literature and creativity and ideas and humour and used that.

David Almond26:21

Yeah, and watching her grow up and using books with her really confirmed my belief in children's literature because um I learned so much about reading and writing from using picture books with her. You know, if you watch a child reading a picture book, you read you understand why pages matter, because you turn the page, oh yes, and then the next page and there's a great moment of discovery and excitement, and then the next page comes, oh so you really get the sense that a book is a series of secrets exposed, of discoveries.

Presenter26:49

What does she think of your books when they come out then? Does she give you a little critie?

David Almond26:52

She doesn't critique them, she reads them and um but then it's it's just me dad, you know.

David Almond26:58

But what did happen was when she was four and I thought, well, ooh, I can't really be a children's writer and have a daughter and not write a picture book. So I wrote a picture book when she was four. And then when she was eight, she went through this process of, you know, when kids are growing up and we think, oh, they're grown up now, so they need to leave pictures behind, which I think is balmy. You know, why should children and people say books without pictures as being somehow more grown up, and I think that's just mad. So I wrote a book with pictures in it called My Dad's a Birdman, and then went on to write more because I think that's important.

Presenter27:27

What about the problem of well, w with musicians we call it second album syndrome. You know, you've had this first great hit and you've said so much and people have loved you for it, and then everybody's waiting for the second album to come out, in your case the second book.

Speaker 227:36

Uh

David Almond27:36

The second album

Presenter27:40

Did you feel worried about that after Skellig, about the fact that you m maybe couldn't live up to what you'd just produced?

David Almond27:45

But by the time Skellig was taken, I'd been writing for all these years and working really hard, and I knew the important thing was just to get the next book done. So that between acceptance and publication there was over a year. And on the one hand, I thought, oh no, that's too long. But then I thought, well, I'll just write the next book. So I wrote the next book in that space. And the next book was Kit's Wilderness, which in fact, as a writer, I think is a much better book than Skelligit's.

Presenter28:08

You went on a couple of years ago to write a book where uh Mina was the central character, and for anybody who's a fan of Skellig, they will know of course that she plays a very important uh role in in the book Skellig.

Presenter28:18

M

Presenter28:19

She has lost a parent and she pretends to people that uh she, you know, doesn't remember her father and she she she her father died before she was born. But of course this is not the case. And I'm wondering if how much you drew on the resource of losing your father when you were relatively young?

David Almond28:36

I think I did. I think I obviously did. But again, it was a case where I couldn't think about that too much.

David Almond28:42

Writing My Name is Meana was a um a great experience because when you're writing you

David Almond28:48

You can become someone else. I wasn't David Armand, I was Mina. The book was called My Name is Meena. So weirdly, I'm obviously not an adolescent girl, but I felt like Mina when I was writing the book. And when you take on a character and write from their point of view, they release something about you that you didn't know was there.

David Almond29:06

So she allowed me to write in a very minor-ish way, in a way I wouldn't have been able to write as David Ormond. It sounds daft.

Presenter29:13

Let's have some more music then, David Almond. We're gonna hear what now.

David Almond29:17

This is Bach Gild Goldberg Variations, which we played when our daughter was being born.

Presenter30:21

That was the first variation from Bach's Gouldberg variations performed by Glen Gould. So you're writing for adults now as well the true tale of the monster Billy Dean?

David Almond30:32

Boom.

Presenter30:32

Why?

David Almond30:33

Billy had been pestering me for years and it was like a voice in my head that kept jabbering away. And so when I finished Mina, I said, Right, now is the time to allow Billy to come to the front and then Billy began to write his story. And I wanted to write a story that was totally misspelt, because it's a book written by somebody who can't write. He's learning to write, he's learning how to shape stories in the process of doing it, which seems to me is what we do as we grow up. So it's a book that's told in Billy's voice. It's a kind of it's phonetically spelt. But in some ways it it feels like a you know, it was published for adults. It feels like a natural development of the work that I've been doing for children anyway. And it's not as if I said, Oh, I've got to somehow, you know, write something really special for adults. It just felt like another book.

Presenter31:21

You have said that one of the important parts of the creative process is is being disciplined. So you're disciplined, are you, about how your day is? Are you one of those writers who says, you know, three hours before breakfast, two hours in the morning, pub, about how do you structure your writing? Not much before breakfast.

David Almond31:33

Not much before breakfast. No, I I am. I work from 9.30 until 5 when I'm at home writing. Often I go into a library. I go into a great library called the Lytton Phil in Newcastle, which is a fantastic place, and I go and sit there, or I sit in my shed at home. But it's important just to sit down. You know, routine is really important. So while the creative process looks very loose and free, it can only work well within a structure.

Presenter32:00

You said earlier that you much to your surprise you did get bitten by the bug as a teacher. You found out that the children mattered to you and the whole process mattered to you. Writing, of course, is by its very nature a solitary thing. Do you still make sure that you get a little fix of the classroom now and again? Do you go out and talk to children about it?

David Almond32:14

When I go to schools, I was in schools two days ago and just fantastic. You know, children who get such a terrible press, we have great children in this country. I work in universities, I'm a professor of creative writing now at Bathspaw and I teach adults, I teach students, I teach children. Creativity and the imagination are central to us all.

Presenter32:34

How are you going to be on the island? You'll be alone, of course?

David Almond32:37

I think I'll be okay. I think being a Catholic there's a part of me which is always kind of tempted towards um living in the wilderness, you know, or being I'm a great admirer of Saint Cuthbert who lived on Linda's Farn and then moved to another island to be totally on his own when all he could see were the stars in heaven. So I think I might manage for a while, but I think I'd get bored and a bit um a bit lonely.

Presenter32:58

Let's have your final piece then. What are we going to hear now?

David Almond33:01

The final piece is Natalie Merchant, who I really like, a wonderful singer and songwriter. And this is her singing Which Side Are You On? which seems to me it's a kind of a protest song from the thirties America, and it seems you know people are singing these songs again when the poor are yet again being made to pay for the wickedness of the rich.

Speaker 233:20

Come all you good workers, good news to you out town.

Speaker 233:28

How the good old Jung young has come in here to dwell.

Presenter33:28

Hello.

Speaker 333:35

Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?

Speaker 233:35

Sad are you?

Speaker 333:42

Which cell are you on, boys, which cell are you on?

Presenter33:50

Which Side Are You On? by Natalie Merchant. So, David, we are going to now give you the books: the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along to the island. What's it going to be?

David Almond33:59

Uh it would be The Thousand and One Nights. I think just such a great fund of stories and um I thought about taking a novel, but you can't read a novel twenty five times. Um so The Thousand and One Nights, which is just filled with energy and all kinds of stories and characters, fantastic.

Presenter34:09

But it's not

Presenter34:14

Right, it's yours. And you're allowed a luxury too. What will your luxury be?

David Almond34:18

Uh it would have to be notebooks. Um I'd just come back from Japan. I love Japan and I love Japanese notebooks, those lovely soft covered, beautifully designed notebooks and um some pens. And I'd just I think I'd draw as well as write and maybe invent a new alphabet.

Presenter34:34

Right, okay. Those are yours then, and your light to save a disk from the waves. Which one will you save?

David Almond34:39

The one I'd save it would have to be Monteverdi, Lofeo. Fantastic.

Presenter34:43

Right, it's yours. David Ahmed, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

David Almond34:46

Thank you very much. It's been great.

Presenter35:14

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio Four.