Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Children's writer whose debut novel Skellig won major awards, known for complex, philosophical tales with down-to-earth characters.
On the island
Eight records
Possente spirtoFavourite
Anthony Rolfe Johnson, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
This is from L'Offeo by Mondeverdi, who had discovered when I was 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 [Charon] to let him through. So how does he do it? By singing beautifully.
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.
Luciano Pavarotti, Mirella Freni, Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan
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.
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.
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein
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.
Tod Machover, Matthew Long, Merin Lezan, Omar Ibrahim, Northern Symphonia
We're now having um oh, this is the opera of Skellig. Um 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.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variation 1
This is Bach Gild Goldberg Variations, which we played when our daughter was being born.
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.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35Does writing involve a sort of catharsis for you?
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.
Presenter asks
1:45When Skellig was published to great acclaim at age 47, after two decades of writing, did it come as a relief?
Yeah, I'd been writing forever and um when [Skellig] 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 … 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.
Presenter asks
2:21If you had never been published and met with success, would you still be writing at home while working to pay the bills?
The keepsakes
The book
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.
The luxury
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.
Oh, absolutely. And you know, for those two decades before [Skellig] 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.
Presenter asks
2:44When you see your books in a room, do you still get a thrill?
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.
Presenter asks
4:28People can be touchy about writing for children; we don't regard children's literature as highly as adult literature.
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 Skellig. 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.
Presenter asks
5:17You've said you didn't want to be known as a Northern writer.
If you grew up in the north as I did, and you say, I'm a writer … 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 better writer.
“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.”
“I 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.”
“If we try to constrict people too much, we'll stop them learning.”
“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?”
“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.”
“Routine is really important. So while the creative process looks very loose and free, it can only work well within a structure.”