Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Author and Booker Prize-winning novelist who became the inaugural laureate for Irish fiction.
On the island
Eight records
Intermezzo in E-flat major, Op. 117 No. 1
we would break in suddenly to this lovely Brahms intermezzo in E flat, and it was a moment when I lifted my head from the desk.
This is a track that I listened to in my first years in college when I started going out with my husband Martin.
This is Case of You by Joni Mitchell, which comes from that time.
This song was actually James Joyce's second favourite song. … I heard it when I was a teenager and then it disappeared. … So when I finally landed on it, I was delighted.
Ah, this is a song that my husband plays. Sometimes after dinner he picks up the guitar. And I know he's feeling feisty if it's this song by Johnny Cash.
This is a track by Laurie Anderson, which takes me back to those broadcasting days, and it's Hiawatha from Strange Angels.
Actually, when I was 13, my siblings, my appalling siblings, gave me a book of poetry by Leonard Cohen as a birthday present. It was called Flowers for Hitler.
Soave sia il vento (from Così fan tutte)Favourite
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Walter Berry, Christa Ludwig
It's a sublime trio. They're waving off a ship, waving goodbye to their lovers who are actually not on the ship. … So it's a kind of joke goodbye. And as a joke goodbye, I think it's perfect for a funeral, perhaps even my own, as I sail off down the aisle.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:50When you took on your laureateship, you mentioned that you wanted to raise the issue of the gender imbalance in the canon. What needed to be said?
It was really moving to be somehow chosen and I took on the gender thing with great reluctance because I wanted to be a writer, which was a very important thing to be, and not a woman, which was a slightly less important thing to be. But I thought I'm going to say the things that need to be said. … I got dug into the issue of gender and the canon. … The disparity that I found that was most interesting is that women are very happy to admire men, but men find it very difficult to admire women in return.
Presenter asks
3:52You spent three years with that as one of the key issues that you wanted to talk about. How much progress were you able to make, do you think?
Well, those three years coincided with an absolute explosion of wonderful literature by women, world-taking literature, books by women. Emer McBride, Sally Rooney, Anna Burns, three great female writers. So by the time I'd said it, there was no need to prove it. And the walls had all been tumbling down. So I was just part of that.
Presenter asks
6:53Was there a sense of trying to get your voice to cut through, trying to make yourself heard?
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
If I was, you know, a very long time on the Desert Island, I could have a parallel text with the French on one side and the English on the other, and I could uh work up my French.
The luxury
high thread count cotton sheets
I'd like some r really high thread count cotton sheets, please. Okay. Yeah, dense, cold, cold cotton. It has to be over six hundred or nothing.
Yeah, there are five interesting people in my generation of the family, and each with their own point of view. … I wasn't the official keeper of records for sure. You had to become a writer then. I had to become a writer, and it annoyed them all.
Presenter asks
8:01Tell me a little bit more about your mother. Cora, you've said that you have a theory that writers all have mothers that are big figures in their lives.
People's mothers are big to them, one way or the other, whether they talk about it or not. And maybe writers are better at admitting that. But yeah, my mother is ninety one. She grew up in Phibsburgh in Dublin. And I think the most mythic thing about my mother is that she was born after her father died. So she was a magical event. And a kind of perhaps a disaster as well as a wonderful happening.
Presenter asks
11:44You've said that you was strongly committed not to be whatever a girl was when you were young. What do you mean by that?
A funny thing kicked in in my teens and I still don't get it, and it is that thing that girls have to be good. … I do remember being very cross when people tried to limit what I wanted to have or get or be. I remember being very noncompliant, yeah.
Presenter asks
26:47Your fourth novel, The Gathering, was published in two thousand seven and it won the Booker Prize. That brings money, of course, fifty thousand pounds, and global recognition. How did it affect you personally?
Well, it didn't affect me at all for a while. It seemed to affect everyone around me in the most hilarious sort of way or alarming sort of way. … People change within the industry and their attitude to you shifts. … I have a great sort of yearning for the privacy of the book. … It didn't make people necessarily happy. … Who wasn't happy? Everyone who thought they should have won the prize, they were unhappy. Particularly it has to be said the guys were made unhappy. … I think it's true that if a woman does well, that men can be sort of somehow personally insulted by their success.
“I like the work to be flawed, I like it to engage and put people off even.”
“I write to shut the world away.”
“I had to become a writer, and it annoyed them all.”
“She said, Well, you know, there was always hell. And there was always hell.”
“He said, yes, it's so mortifying, isn't it?”
“I think it's true that if a woman does well, that men can be sort of somehow personally insulted by their success.”