Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A prize-winning novelist and short-story writer, shy of the publishing publicity machine.
On the island
Eight records
Gaelic version of The Beatles' 'Blackbird'
Erasimos Lavranos (lyrics by Alekos Sakellarios)
From the film 'Η σωφερίνα' (I soferina / The Lady Driver)
Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21: IV. Adagio – Allegro molto e vivaceFavourite
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim
Final movement (Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace)
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:39Your books have won numerous literary awards. Explain to us – I can only imagine it's a kind of specific torture once you are nominated – because you don't ask to be nominated. And then you find yourself on these short lists – suddenly do you begin to care?
No, it's nothing to do with the book. It's like if you went into a department store and someone was really nice to you, you know, when you bought something and someone was really nice to you and you you say goodbye and you felt better and you went out, that's nice, it lasts that much and you're and it just it happens over there, like three miles away and you can see something happening in the distance. As it gets closer and if and depending on how much noise is around the thing, it's a bit like having a brass band playing reasonably close to your ear, you just have to ignore it.
Presenter asks
5:45You've said before that you're never sure if something's going to be a novel or a short story. Now, that seems very curious to me – how do you know?
It depends what you're working on. The thing about a novel is that it's rather like a giant hoover. It just hoovers up everything that comes through you, but the forms are really different. So, for instance, if I'm working in the novel form, again, it takes a great space of time and it wakes you in the middle of the night and you never stop thinking about it, you're never not accompanied by it. Short stories are shorter. Because they're shorter, they tend to be harder in a way. The end of the process of putting together a book of short stories, I have found I felt much worse than at the end of finishing a novel.
The keepsakes
The luxury
I'm going to take the Palazzo Scifanoia, which is a really beautiful fourteen hundreds uh frescoed palace in Ferrara, which is the most beautiful, beautiful place I have ever been
Presenter asks
9:33Were stories part of your childhood – did your mother read to you a lot?
Oh my goodness. On a Saturday night out came my mother's real uh glorious nature. Uh we we all had our baths on a Saturday night. I'm the small one. I get bathed. I get s I sit on her knees, she's wrapped me in a towel and then suddenly she just turns into another character… She would turn into one of two witches who were called Gertie and Bella. She would turn into a woman from the Scottish Islands and she would make a monologue which sounded like a kind of eulogy and a prayer.
Presenter asks
20:05You came from a Catholic background. You say your mother was in many ways a proper person. Was it ever an issue for you with your family [being gay]?
It's funny thinking about it now. It's such a different world and yet it's absolutely the same world and we're all the same people and yet it's so different… There's a point at which I come home, 1984, so I'm what, 22, 21, 22, and my mum says to me, 'Is it true that you and your friend were seen holding hands at the theatre, down between the seats?' And then she said, 'Tell me it isn't true.' And so I said, 'It isn't true,' because she knew perfectly well, and I knew perfectly well that it was true, but she had wanted not to hear it. … My dad was very different and say ten years later I could feel him kind of frustrated with me for something and we'd never spoken out at all about my life as as a gay person and um and it surprised me. I realized actually he was frustrated because we hadn't and because he thought that everybody else in the family knew something that he didn't. So I did. I started just to tell him about my life and oh my goodness me, if we could be even more friends, we were.
Presenter asks
28:35We started today with a quote from you: stories can change lives. We tell ourselves stories about our lives; we write our own lives. In the process of writing, what have you learned about yourself throughout the decades?
I don't read my writing. You can't read your own writing. All you do is see the mistakes and the annoying things and hope that something's working and not know whether it is. But I am a reader and I feel like I've been made by a million books. I feel like any book I've ever written has been kind of drawn together from everything I've read. And I don't mean just books. I also mean like the sides of pencils and the sides of buses and the things that catch the corner of the eye as we walk past them. We are made by what we read, we are made by what we take into ourselves. If there's anything at all in this body right now, then I'm going to thank all those books for it.
“No, it's nothing to do with the book. It's like if you went into a department store and someone was really nice to you, you know, when you bought something and someone was really nice to you and you you say goodbye and you felt better and you went out, that's nice, it lasts that much and you're and it just it happens over there, like three miles away and you can see something happening in the distance. As it gets closer and if and depending on how much noise is around the thing, it's a bit like having a brass band playing reasonably close to your ear, you just have to ignore it.”
“The thing about a novel is that it's rather like a giant hoover. It just hoovers up everything that comes through you, but the forms are really different. So, for instance, if I'm working in the novel form, again, it takes a great space of time and it wakes you in the middle of the night and you never stop thinking about it, you're never not accompanied by it. Short stories are shorter. Because they're shorter, they tend to be harder in a way. The end of the process of putting together a book of short stories, I have found I felt much worse than at the end of finishing a novel.”
“She would turn into one of two witches who were called Gertie and Bella. She would turn into a woman from the Scottish Islands and she would make a monologue which sounded like a kind of eulogy and a prayer. If she didn't turn into the characters, which was terrifying enough when you were seven or eight years old, she would start singing these Victorian songs about dead orphans just to make me cry.”
“My mum says to me, 'Is it true that you and your friend were seen holding hands at the theatre, down between the seats?' And then she said, 'Tell me it isn't true.' And so I said, 'It isn't true,' because she knew perfectly well, and I knew perfectly well that it was true, but she had wanted not to hear it.”
“We treat grief incredibly lightly in this culture, and we mustn't. We have to know that, you know, grief isn't over in three weeks or three months' grief. Is part of the bone structure of us and it takes the years that it takes. And it changes you. It actually transforms you. It's part of the transformative things that happen to us in our lives.”