Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historical novelist of best-selling 'Labyrinth'; co-founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction and champion of women's stories.
On the island
Eight records
It is her earliest actual memory, singing it in assembly at infant school, and represents how she still feels looking out at the world in the morning.
These Boots Are Made for Walkin'
Her parents had this album and her mother loved it. She and her sisters would jump around the sitting room dancing to it.
A constant presence in her teenage years. It was exactly the length of time it took her to get her school uniform on and her bag sorted in her bedroom.
Part of the 80s protest music she loved, representing standing up, being counted, and not being a bystander.
A big feminist banger that she used as a preset playlist in the wings during her one-woman show to dance to before going on stage.
Piano Concerto in G Major (Second Movement)Favourite
Martha Argerich, London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado
Ravel's love letter to the piano. She associates it with the end of life, finding it gentle, true, poignant, and complete.
The ultimate multi-generational women dancing in the kitchen song, which she danced to at her 50th and 60th birthday parties.
Chosen for her husband Greg, whom she met at school and reunited with years later on a train.
In conversation
Presenter asks
6:27You were born very prematurely. How did that affect your relationship with your father?
My dad, who was a very traditional English gent, but at the same time he was completely hands-on in a way that fathers weren't. He was there when you were born. He was called and he held me first because my ma was unconscious … it meant that the first five days of my life, it was touch and go for both my ma and for me. And there was my dad … He changed nappies, we did everything together. He was like a much more modern father.
Presenter asks
12:26Did Oxford University live up to your expectations?
I loved it and I'd never been to Oxford until I went to have my interview … my lovely dad, when he took me up for the interview, and he just said, remember, he said, if you walk around looking as if you belong here, people will think you do … The thing that I learned when I got there was that what matters is that you're supported and that you're loved. That's it. If you have that, then you can give anything a go, and if it doesn't work out, you can do something else.
Presenter asks
17:07When you co-founded the Women's Prize for Fiction, how do you remember that time?
I was very naïve. It didn't occur to me that it would be seen as a political act or an anti-male act … But it was interpreted absolutely as an anti-male thing … so for the next five months, it was just permanent attack, really. And there were two things. One was if women were any good, they'd win the real prizes … yet fewer than 9% of authors ever shortlisted for literary prizes were women. So there was just a clear disconnect.
The keepsakes
The book
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets has been a sequence of poems that have kept me company for all of my kind of grown-up life... can be read in any single way and mean a different thing at any moment... some of the beautiful lines... In my beginning is my end... words slip, slide, perish, decay... there's just so much beauty in the language... and I think that if I was on my own... Four Quartets is the perfect meditation on what it means to be human.
The luxury
a jukebox, a kind of Wurlitzer
I decided I would take a jukebox, a kind of Wurlitzer... It is a beautiful kind of mechanical, magical idea... it's that pressing of the button, you press the letter, and then you press the number, and you watch it fall down... I would remember all the people that I'd listened to the music, the theatre of the jukebox, would be what I needed. I would feel that all those ghosts were there with me still and they would help people my island, and that is what I would need.
Presenter asks
20:49Did you have a sense that you had a hit on your hands before Labyrinth came out?
No, you don't even really believe that anybody who isn't your mum is going to read it. It's that kind of thing. And also, I'd been writing it in my spare time essentially, and it had been going on for a really long time … The game changer was the paperback, and it was being on the Richard and Judy Show.
Presenter asks
24:37What made you sure you wanted to take on the role of a carer?
I'm not sure that it ever felt like there was a choice. It just seemed like, well, this is what needed to happen, rather than it's a choice to do it. And it was an extraordinary thing, because particularly with my dad, I was very, very close to my dad and very, very close to my mum.
Presenter asks
29:31What is your best advice to aspiring writers?
When inspiration arrives, I want it to find me working. That's the point. You don't always feel in the mood. You don't always feel that the words are going to come, but you go to your desk every day. You treat it seriously … And if you do a tiny bit of writing every day so your muscles are ready for it, it means that you take away the fear of the blank page, the blank screen, so that when you do have time to sit down and write that novel or that biography or that history, you're ready to go.
“My most inspiring research comes from my feet. I walk around in a place that inspires me and dream about the book for months.”
“Feminism is about men and women together. We built the world together, we can change the world together, we can make the world fairer together, men and women together.”
“Carers are everywhere and invisible. A woman has a 50-50% chance of being a carer by the time she's 59.”