Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An author of best-selling novels with inventive narratives; Whitbread Book of the Year winner; creator of the Jackson Brody series.
On the island
Eight records
Because it's jaunty and makes you feel great. The first notes of In the Mood and you want to be on your feet.
She was a northern girl, and I like the idea of a great operatic voice singing about the keelmen carrying coal across the tide.
It was the first record I ever bought, at the age of six. There's a risqué edge to the song.
It's a live version in Tokyo – they substitute Japanese towns. This land is your land, this land is my land. It's upbeat and political.
I love Leonard Cohen. He's a brooding, mysterious, dark poet. He's a kind of guru to me.
For he's gone and married Yum-Yum (from The Mikado)
D'Oyly Carte Opera Chorus and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
I love the Mikado. The final chorus makes me feel incredibly elated. It's madly English eccentric nonsense.
It's one of the few sad songs I've chosen. It has a strain of melancholic nostalgia. Country music tells a story about the heart.
Symphony No. 5 in C minorFavourite
I toyed with the ninth, but the fifth is so resonant with emotion. It's communication at the deepest level – the mystery of art.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:53Tell me about that unconscious process at work – when you start clearing out your drawers, does it mean you're writing?
I do find sorting incredibly therapeutic because it's mindless yet it's purposeful. … It allows your brain some space to start doing a lot of unconscious thinking, and then you have very tidy drawers at the end of it.
Presenter asks
2:34What happens when the story starts to take shape? You've described writing as a physical process – what does that mean?
I don't think writing … is something that just flows out of you in this strange stream of consciousness. It's something that you have to make. It's fabricated. It's for all intents and purposes. It's a work of art.
Presenter asks
3:17Your work is not autobiographical, but you've also said that everything that's happened to you goes into your writing. Tell me about that.
By necessity, because it comes out of my brain … obviously you're taking it from your own experience, and history, and beliefs, and everything. So, everything about you goes into it, and it comes out in a different form.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (and her letters)
Emily Dickinson
Because I do really, really love Emily Dickinson's poetry, but it is opaque, and I think it would probably take me the entire time I'm on that island to untangle those poems.
The luxury
a mature oak tree (500 years old)
I'd like it to be mature, so about five hundred years old, please. So it's big enough to hug and then it's old enough to be a companion. And hopefully it will attract lots of birds... I love trees, so I can't think of anything more wonderful than having an oak tree. A noble oak tree.
Presenter asks
6:15Your novels are hugely evocative of a particular era. How do you go about creating that atmosphere?
Even from a child I enjoyed thinking about what it would be like to live in past times. And I come from York, which is a very historic town. … Certainly with the wartime books, I definitely did an immersion. I listened to music from the period, watched films and documentaries.
Presenter asks
11:37Tell me about your parents, starting with your dad. What was he like?
He was self taught. He was an autodidact and he came from a poor family, mining family. … He was very aspirational. … He liked women, not in a salacious way, but he enjoyed the company of women. And my mother, unfortunately, was none of those things. She was really quite asocial. … They were a very poor match.
Presenter asks
17:17Take me back to when you were still Catherine. What kind of girl were you?
I think I was formed by the fact I was an only child … because you long to have brothers and sisters, but when you go into families with siblings, you recoil in horror because they just seem to fight all the time. … I was spoiled. I was told this regularly, Catherine, you're spoiled. And I was also told I was posh because I went to a private primary school.
“I do find sorting incredibly therapeutic because it's mindless yet it's purposeful. … It allows your brain some space to start doing a lot of unconscious thinking, and then you have very tidy drawers at the end of it.”
“The smell of cocoa to me is very redolent. And also my father used to take me to the pub across the road … and so I was brought up on the stale smell of beer and cigarettes and it's strangely a smell I really love.”
“I had this great moment with her … I was sitting watching the royal wedding … with my own small child on my lap. And I thought I have to introduce this subject to my mother. So I said, you never said that you were married before. And she said, no, I was going to tell you, but you left the room.”
“I buried my father the day before the Whitbread, so I was probably in a rather strange frame of mind. … The headlines were all about Rushdie not winning, rather than about me winning. … There was a lot of nasty stuff in the papers.”
“I very rarely leave the house actually. In fact, I'm thinking of getting a dog because it would make me leave the house … in order to write, you have to be antisocial. … It's a very solitary occupation, and I think doing it makes you more solitary.”
“I'd like [the oak tree] to be mature, so about five hundred years old, please. So it's big enough to hug and then it's old enough to be a companion. And hopefully it will attract lots of birds who are so bored with palm trees that they all come thinking, well, this is exciting.”