Sigrid Rausing

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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.

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

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My castaway this week is the philanthropist and publisher Sigrid Rausing.

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Founder of one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations, her Trust has given away around two hundred and thirty million pounds since it began.

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Along with the weighty business of deciding precisely who gets the benefit of her fortune, she also owns the publishing house and literary magazine Granta. By all accounts she's made a life that skilfully circumnavigates the trap of being one of the idle rich.

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Along with her wealth, she appears to have inherited her family's predisposition for the practical. Her grandfather was concerned with making milk portable and pasteurized. The family billions come from the invention and manufacture of tetrapac cartons. My Castaway has applied herself to making life better for people suffering violence, war, and inhumanity. She says,

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We live in a profoundly unfair society. Wealth is increasing for the wealthy, and debt is increasing for those in debt. Once you know that, it seems to me.

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You can't not try to do something for the common good with that money. So welcome, Sigrid Reising. It is impossible to introduce you this morning without referring immediately to your wealth and the wealth of your family. Given that that has been the story of your life, I'm wondering how adept you are at sniffing out

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When people are more interested in what you have than who you are.

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Um

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I expect very good.

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In a certain sense it's something that I take absolutely for granted as a it's an existential condition. I take it for granted that to some degree the money adds a bit of glamour, even if people don't want anything and most people don't want anything, you know, it's still part of who I am.

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Money is a great opportunity. It although it can lead to great opportunities, it's also a great responsibility. And I mean that not just in an ethical sense. It's a great responsibility just to deal with it in a kind of practical level. Have there been times in your life

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when you had wished that the fortune wasn't there.

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The family fortune wasn't there.

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No, I don't think so, because there has never been a time when I was so pained by it.

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That I wished it wasn't there. I've never felt.

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particularly guilty about it, and I know that many people do. My parents and my grandfather in particular, I think, had a very healthy and very tough attitude to money. Uh my father was completely uninterested in money, but, you know, wasn't pained by it either, you know.

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Let's not forget that the greatest problems that people have is really

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when they have no money and no connections.

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You know, and and that's so much worse than the kind of problem of having money. Running a business is a very different concept from running a foundation.

Sigrid Rausing3:33

Uh

Speaker 23:33

Yeah.

Sigrid Rausing3:33

Yeah.

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What is it you're looking for when you sit down and read a manuscript?

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It has to be a story that grabs you. You know, grant us strength was really publishing, you know, fascinating stories, extremely well written. I think the art of being an editor is that you create the order which I always do myself, the flat planning. It's about how

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The whole thing comes together as a whole, you know, and and that's a very interesting thing.

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Time then, uh, secret rising for your first piece of music. Te tell us about what we're going to hear. Why have you chosen this? Well, so my first record is Katie Lang singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. And I love it because I love her voice. There's so much strength and truth and passion in it.

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Well she tied you to her kitchen chair, she broke your throne and cut your hair, and from your lips she drew

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On the

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Hallelujah.

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Uh

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Katie Lang and hallelujah. So, Sigrid Reising, you're Swedish by birth. Your mother, Marit, was an academic. Your father, Hans, was managing director of the family business. You were the middle child of three. Mhm. And what was life like growing up? Paint me a little picture.

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We lived in the townhouse in by the cathedral.

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in the town of Lund, in southern Sweden.

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And Lund is a bit like Cambridge in Sweden. It's a smaller of the two university towns.

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You were at schools and educated with other kids or were you probably right? Yeah, yeah, we were at state schools, yeah.

Sigrid Rausing5:24

So

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and Tetrapark.

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was at that time about the only

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Industrial development, I love. And so it had been started by your grandfather?

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And it had been started because Well, my grandfather started with another entrepreneur called Eric Okelund. And at that time nobody really believed in the technology of tetrapag the packages were leaking terribly. Nobody wanted them. And so my father, who was only, I think, twenty-five at the time,

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was put in charge of this small company and he really built it up to what it later became.

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I've read in interviews you describe your father as a libertarian. Tell me about the times that he decided to reposition the trees near your summer house, or maybe a maybe repositioning it is a generous term. Tell me what happened.

Sigrid Rausing6:16

Maybe

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Well, there was a wonderful slope of juniper and heather near our house, our weekend house, and at a certain point the village council decided to plant it over with conifers.

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And my father was so incensed by this, the loss of this beautiful patch of heather and juniper, that that he took us one night to protest to tear up some of the conifers. And it was very typical of my father, you know. It is the opposite of what most parents are trying to teach their children, which is, you know, you abide by the rule of law, and if it says walk on this side of the pavement, that's what you do. But was there sort of something faintly countercultural about your father? Did he want to shake things up? A little bit. He was very suspicious of state power.

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You know, maybe we could reason, you know, because he grew up during the war, you know, Nazi Germany was was

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It was very present for my grandfather and my father, and so that that suspicion of the State, and what the power of the State can do,

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Is something that I grew up with. How would you describe your father's character if you were to describe it to a stranger?

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He is very eccentric. He is very inventive. He is a kind of true anarchist. And what about your mother? How would you describe her? She was an intellectual. She was she taught at university. She is very funny, witty, vivacious.

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Let's have some more music, Sigrid Rousing. Tell me about your second one. Speaking of Witty, what are we going to hear? And so my second record is Tom Lear singing The Vatican Rag. My parents loved Tom Lear, so I I listened to this a lot when I was a child.

Sigrid Rausing8:03

First you get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries, bow your head with great respect and chimney fleck, chimney fleck, chimney fleck.

Sigrid Rausing8:16

Do whatever steps you want if you have cleared them with the pontiff Everybody say his own Kyrie Lay is on doing the Vatican right

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Is on Kirier.

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Yeah.

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Tom Lehrer and Vatican Rag. When we think of the rousing name, we think well, I think about it with names like, you know, Getty and Aniely and and Guinness and Rothschild, and when I think of Getty, I think of the kidnap.

Sigrid Rausing8:41

And get

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Of Paul Getty. It happened in 1973. He was a youngster. He would just have been three or four years older than you at the time. A teenager kidnapped for, I think there was a ransom demand of around about $17 million on his head, a fortune. How aware were you of the story at the time, given that you were in this family? You know, they were industrialists, they were building their fortune. We had a lot of discussions about security, a few kidnap threats ourselves. One was a threat that came to my grandfather that I think involved us children. There was a much more serious one from a group of Danes who were affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

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That was a kidnap.

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plan about my cousin in the early eighties and the police found the plan in the flat and they found the biggest weapon stash ever found, I think, in a private

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House in Europe. Your parents have this young growing family. What steps do they take to make your life different and safer? Do they do anything tangible?

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I mean, we had endless alarms. I mean, to this day, I I can't bear alarms.

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But at the same time, I have to say, you know, Sweden and London in particular, you know, it was a very safe environment.

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You signed up to Amnesty International when you were just fifteen.

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That seems quite young untypically young. What what was the motivation for that?

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Well, I started out as being very

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protective of animals and including our animals and I felt very, very strongly about that.

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And then I became interested.

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in human rights.

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I'd always grown up with stories about the Holocaust.

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My grandfather and his brother had been very involved in

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The Welcome Committee for the Danish Jews Coming to Sweden.

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And so it just meant that an interest in human rights

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was was kind of part of what we were talking about as a family, you know. Yeah, and so there you were as this thoughtful, socially engaged young woman with with, you know, parents you were close to, and yet at seventeen you decide you're leaving school in Sweden. Mhm. How did that come about?

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Um

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Well, I d uh I have a history of depression and I had my first episode of depression was at that time. Um and what happened actually was that I I stopped going to school and as a result of that I then had a year off. And I came to England

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And that kind of healed me. And then I, after my year off, I went to school in England.

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and stayed on and my parents moved over two years later.

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It can take people a very long time to work out that actually they suffer from clinical depression, and certainly somebody as young as seventeen. Did you understand it as depression at the time, or did you just think I need a change, I don't like it here?

Sigrid Rausing11:32

Yeah.

Sigrid Rausing11:34

Hmm.

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I didn't understand what was happening to me. I was so disassociated and and, you know, not only

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feeling very depressed, but also I was very paralyzed.

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You say you came to England and it and it cured that episode. What was it about being in a different place and in being in this place that m managed to to lift your spirits?

Sigrid Rausing11:58

Mm

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Oh, I was I was staying in the country with some wonderful friends of my parents, and I think just being there, feeling very safe, going for long, long, long walks in the countryside, doing some perfectly useless cooking and gardening, I had no idea how to do either.

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But it was a kind of asylum, you know, it was a period of

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Great Peace. Let's have some more music, Sigrid Reisen. We're going to listen to your third disc. Tell me about this.

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So my third record is Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire, which I think perfectly to me sums up what it is to be depressive and to

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You know, you try to make it life, you try to

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make relationships and it just

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says something about how hard that is.

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Like

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Um

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On the wire.

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Like a drunken midnight choir

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I have tried.

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In my way.

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To be free.

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Leonard Cohen and Bird on a Wire. So, Sigrid Reising, you read history at York University and then you went on to subsequently to study anthropology.

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Tell me about setting up your um philanthropic trust then. You you did that in the mid-nineties and

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Interestingly, I think you initially named it after your grandparents. It wasn't called the Sigrid Reising Trust, is that right? It wasn't. I did name it after my grandparents. Why did you do that?

Sigrid Rausing13:33

Interest

Sigrid Rausing13:38

Is that right?

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I did it because I wanted to remember them, I wanted to honor them. And so then I thought there was something about human rights which is about standing up and really being counted. And so I decided to use my own name for my trust.

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Do you feel that by having the trust in your name and you being personally accountable and knowable by people who may challenge the funding that you give and who may not agree with and I'm I was going to say political, I mean with the small p, the political decisions of funding that you make, do you feel personally that you now are

Sigrid Rausing14:05

And

Sigrid Rausing14:06

But people

Sigrid Rausing14:11

I don't know.

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A target for their ire, or worse, for their annoyance? I feel a bit of that. I mean, I remember um being in uh Belarus a few years ago, and I was meeting Andrew Sanikov, who was the presidential candidate who had been arrested by President Lukashenko, and he was out of arrest then, and but he was still uh on a curfew. And I met him in the outskirts of of Minsk, um, in a small squaffy flat, and and I remember going back to the hotel and feeling a sense of actually for the first time in my life, a sense of real political nervousness.

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Let's have some more music, Sigrid Rausen. It's your uh it's your fourth. Tell me about this.

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My fourth record is Chopin, Etude, in C major, played by Mari Poria.

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When I first met Eric, Eric Abraham, my husband,

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We used to sit in his car and we used to listen to this and I just remember sitting in the car and the rain drumming on the roof and listening to this very loudly.

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That was Murray Pariah playing Chopin's Etude No. One in C major. Tell me, Secret Rising, there is a view that philanthropic giving, you know, when when charities and trusts and foundations step in

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To take care of the funding of a project, and very often these are seen as essential services.

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That somehow that then absolves the state? No, but we're always very aware that the organizations that we support do mainly advocacy. Some of them do some service provision, but we're quite nervous about funding organizations that only do service uh provision. So

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Our funding is about

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putting pressure on governments, and particularly in repressive or transitional societies. Putting pressure on those governments to try and

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Create conditions for good governance. You know, philanthropic giving in the arts.

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I would say has a very obvious quid pro quo, you know, an auditorium in one's name or a

Sigrid Rausing17:21

Then what

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you know, the wing of a gallery that's associated with the family in perpetuity.

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Truly, that is not so when you're handing money to to women's refuges or to you know to refugee projects, is it?

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Whenever I get kind of fatigue on this, or I get you know, I I see the monthly docket with fifteen or twenty

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grant applications and it's very easy to get tired of it.

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If you travel and see what people are actually doing.

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It's extraordinarily inspiring. And I think it's important. It's important. Tell me about this next piece. It's your fifth of the morning. What are we going to hear? So this song is called Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us and it's by Alison Krause and Robert Plant and it's so beautiful and so haunting.

Sigrid Rausing18:01

What are we gonna hear?

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Strange things are happen

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Every day.

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I hear the music.

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Up above my head.

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Through the sun

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My heart

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Has left me again.

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I you

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Ooh.

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Uh

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That was Alison Krauss and Robert Plant and Sister Rosetta goes before us. Let me ask you, Sigrid Rousing, about you've spoken.

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simply and eloquently about this episode of depression that you suffered when you were seventeen. As I understand it, you had another episode of depression in your in your twenties. Is that what what was it that, if I can say, triggered that? What what were the circumstances of that?

Sigrid Rausing18:53

Zion

Sigrid Rausing18:57

Yeah.

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My brother had just come out of one of his many rehabs.

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He came to stay with me. I was living in Islington then.

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And he immediately relapsed again. And and the thing was that I I had no idea, I did not realize.

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And so he became

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increasingly difficult to live with.

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And I eventually after

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A couple of months of this, I asked him to leave.

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He didn't leave or couldn't leave.

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But he he started just staying in his own bedroom.

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And then.

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after the summer, a summer of this.

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He suddenly was gone.

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And I had no idea where he was.

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And

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Through that autumn.

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I was quite I was mildly depressed, I would think. And then in February my mother

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who never goes down to the village. I mean, she just never goes out to the bank. And this one time she went to the bank to check about something.

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And my brother was there. He'd come back. From Amsterdam, as it turned out.

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He'd put himself on methadone himself to try and get off heroin.

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And she took him in and he went to another rehab.

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A better rehab.

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And when that happened, I...

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I went into a much deeper depression.

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And I think it's quite common, you know, once you know that

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somebody is safe, you can kind of let go a bit. So that spring I was in a f in a very deep

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Depression in a very dark place.

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To any family that deal with an addict at their heart.

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The destructive and the endlessly repeating behaviour that you describe will be so familiar.

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Behaviour

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It's quite uncommon to hear somebody talk about the effect it had upon them. What help was available to you? I mean, you get into this kind of codependent thing, you know, and I had trouble and still have trouble with that term. But, you know, what it means is that your life, your fate becomes just entangled in somebody else's life. And, you know, I think that was very true for me and my brother. You know, I was very entangled in his addiction.

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I ended up going myself as a family member to that same rehab. I cut my arms and then they found me bad and

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Just being with other people was very healing for me.

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For a long time then, this situation, you know, had been a private agony for you. Yeah.

Sigrid Rausing21:52

Yeah.

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for your family. Then, very dramatically, it became front page news in 2012. Your brother was arrested for drug possession and subsequently there was a raid on his home in Belgravia and it was there that police discovered the body of his wife in a bedroom that had been hidden for two months. This body was decomposing.

Presenter22:17

His his wife, I should say, had also had a a history of drug addiction and recovery as well, so that was part of this whole dramatic circumstance.

Sigrid Rausing22:23

That was part of this whole drama.

Presenter22:26

Yeah. How do you look back on that time now? It was uh completely surreal. We were in Sweden at the time. We found that the day after we came to Sweden.

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You know, it was

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A huge shock.

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What do you think a relationship is with very, very privileged people who find themselves in circumstances such as your brother did? You know, I I think maybe the perception is, well, if you have all that money, you just throw money at the problem and surely the best people in the world can solve it.

Sigrid Rausing22:58

Throw money at

Sigrid Rausing22:59

Yeah.

Presenter23:02

Yeah, I think there's a lot of that.

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You know, we had the best people in the world. We had we went through, you know, all the addiction experts, you know, the American addiction experts specializing in wealthy families.

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You know, I know that whole landscape so well.

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And

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What I can say about it is that it doesn't help very much.

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Let's take a break for some music, then, Sigrid Rousing. Tell me about this.

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This song is The Last Goodbye by The Kills.

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I've always associated this song with Eva.

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And what happened to her? I should say, of course, that Eva was your brother's late wife. It's very sad to me.

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It's the last goodbye, I swear.

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I can't rely

Sigrid Rausing23:51

BAIN

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On a diamond day low

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Let them go anywhere.

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I learn to cry for someone else.

Presenter24:11

That was the kills and the last goodbye. So, Sigrid Reusing, you married your first husband in nineteen ninety five and uh your son Daniel was born two years later.

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It was two thousand and three when you got married for the second time. Your husband now is the film producer Eric Abraham, the Oscar winning film producer indeed. Is it true that he seduced you with literature?

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To certainly

Presenter24:32

Yes, he did. He did. He would bring me books and and also music, actually, at the shop and going to concerts. And it was two thousand five then, just a couple of years after you married, that you bought Granta Books and Granta magazine.

Sigrid Rausing24:47

Yeah

Presenter24:48

Renowned literary titles within the British establishment. You must have felt quite courageous taking them on.

Sigrid Rausing24:50

Yeah.

Presenter24:56

Something as notable as that. Uncharacteristically courageous. Actually, in the end, I just thought.

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We can do this. This is an amazing

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thing to do and and we did.

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Is it I mean, I get the impression from speaking to you today that it might be the most professionally satisfying thing you've you've done. Yes, I think it really is, because it's you know, when you're funding human rights, you you're really dealing with the whole world, and it it's it's a very big landscape.

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And when you you're dealing with publishing, you know, you're you're thinking about

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How will this book sell? You know, you're thinking you're editing a book or a piece of the magazine.

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And you're in that world, it's a very much smaller world, and I think

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that there is a kind of madness in the big world of philanthropy.

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You know, because there is a kind of madness about money, you know, the sense of

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You have all this money, so you can do anything, you can fix anything. The reality is you can do very little. And it seems to me that business publishing for me

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Recognizes that in a way that's healthy and healing and

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and normal and good.

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Let's have some more music, Sigrid Rousing. Tell me about this. It's your seventh of the morning.

Presenter26:14

This is Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. I get a kick out of you. Eric and I sang at our wedding. We we sang. Are you a good singer? I'm I'm a really bad singer. Is he a good singer? But Eric is a very good singer.

Sigrid Rausing26:24

Are you a good singer

Sigrid Rausing26:27

Is he a good singer?

Presenter26:30

And so when I hitch my voice to his voice, I can kind of stay in harmony. And it reminds me of our wedding and how funny it was. And you know, we were singing and everybody was just laughing. It it was just the greatest thing.

Speaker 326:46

I get no kick from champagne

Speaker 326:53

Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all So tell me why should it be true?

Presenter27:06

Ella Fitzgerald and I get a kick out of you. Was that a little better than the one you sang at your own wedding, Signor Dricey?

Sigrid Rausing27:18

Yeah.

Presenter27:19

I think it was a lot of that. Does being an editor make you a harsher critic of your own work?

Sigrid Rausing27:20

Yeah.

Sigrid Rausing27:23

Mm-hmm.

Presenter27:25

Yes, in a good way, I hope.

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Yes, I am writing now. I'm working on a memoir about what it

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Really what it means to be a family member of an addict. What happens to you when you end up

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holding so much of the discipline.

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One of our advisers was a guy who himself was a recovering alcoholic.

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And he said to me one time after a meeting,

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Oh, I've just shared uh the joke about the family member handshake with your brother. And I said, What's that?

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And he started wagging his finger at me, and he was looking straight at me, and

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you know, wagging his finger.

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I was so upset by that I just started crying and

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And the truth is, of course, that is who you become. You know, you become that voice of morality.

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There is something important to be said about

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The pain of being that voice.

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One of the other biggest roles in your life has been being a a mother and a stepmother. I have two stepchildren who are adult now, Eric's children, and then I'm an aunt of my brothers and Eva's four children.

Presenter28:50

And then I have my own son, Daniel. What have you learned from being a mother, do you think?

Presenter28:56

I have learned to be more authoritative. I don't think that came very naturally to me. You know, my my mother was a wonderful mother, but she was also completely undomestic. You know, she was kind of something else, you know. And so I've had to learn it. And I think whenever

Presenter29:14

you learn something like that, you know, you kind of struggle with the authenticity of it.

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Have you imagined yourself alone on this island, cast away? And if you have, how do you think you'll deal with it? What would your strategy be? Well, I have a huge capacity for being alone. You know, I have no problems with that at all. You know, I I like being on my own. Tell me about your final piece of music then. What are we going to hear, this eighth disc today? The Swan by Camille Sansans, played by Yoho Ma.

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It's my kind of aspirational piece, if you like, because

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It's so filled with gentleness.

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and the sense of harmony and order.

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I find it very soothing and I find it very beautiful.

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Yo Yo Ma playing Saint Sans the Swan with Philippe Entremont on piano. And so it's time, Siglad Rising, for me to to give you your books. You get the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and you're allowed to take

Sigrid Rausing30:58

Here?

Sigrid Rausing30:59

And you're

Presenter31:00

One other book along. As a publisher and a writer, I'll be interested to know what that book's going to be.

Sigrid Rausing31:03

Alexander

Presenter31:05

I'm a great believer in re-reading and re-read Jane Austen on kind of rotation.

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And my favourite Jane Austen is Mansfield Park.

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The description of Fanny's family in Portsmouth and the the poverty the relative poverty that they lived in I think is very, very interesting. You're allowed a luxury to take. What is your luxury going to be?

Sigrid Rausing31:24

to take.

Presenter31:26

I was hoping that you might give me a whole library. I think within the spirit of the luxury, I can allow you a library and whatever's in it is in it. Whereas if you were to specify books, then I think we're sort of doubling up on the books. So I'm going to say you can have a library. I can have the library, then I'll have. I'm saying that, and I'm immediately regressing it, because I know we'll get complaints. But anyway, I've done it now, right? The library, it's a very good thing. The British Library.

Sigrid Rausing31:36

Yeah.

Sigrid Rausing31:41

So I'm gonna say you

Sigrid Rausing31:42

I

Sigrid Rausing31:49

Yeah.

Presenter31:51

What about a track to save? Which one would it be? I would take the Chopin, just because there's more to it. It's dense and complicated, and I think one needs that complexity.

Presenter32:02

It's yours.

Presenter32:04

Sigrid Reusing, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

Presenter32:50

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.