Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Award-winning novelist, author of Hamlet (Women's Prize for Fiction winner) and memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, about her own brushes with mortality.
On the island
Eight records
Elephant GunFavourite
This is one of my favourite tracks of all time. I absolutely love it. And Beirut is one of those bands that I use again and again when I'm getting ready to write.
I knew I had to have some Irish music in my mix. … I've always loved the way Mayhem is counterbalanced with this finely calibrated emotions in Irish music.
I was really fortunate in that I came of age at a time when there was a huge explosion of the indie music scene. … The naughtiest thing I ever did, I think, when I was a teenager was that I told my parents that I was spending the night at a friend's house. But actually I got the train to Manchester and I went to the Hacienda.
Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31
I used to play this on the piano. … I remember really loving the labour of it. … the labour of learning something like this piece is similar to writing a novel.
The whole album really reminds me of travelling on the tube to work when I was in my twenties and I would listen to this on my Sony Walkman and it just brings back that time to me of what it felt like.
this song it really reminds me actually of a particular flat that I lived in when I was about 25 or 26. … it reminds me of what it was like to fall in love with someone with a close friend.
I used to put this on in the early morning when you have those very, very brutally early starts when you've got a very tiny baby. … it always makes me happy and it takes me back to that very raw and beautiful exhaustion of having a tiny baby.
this is a selection for my children. … this reminds me actually most of all of being in the car with all three of my children. … I just know when it happens that I have this very strong sense that I am living in a state of grace.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:44How does the process of collecting and percolating ideas for a book work for you? When do you know your next book is starting to take shape?
Well I think all books creep up on you actually and I think you don't necessarily choose the books. I think the books choose you. I think the best book you can possibly write is the one you can't not write. It's the one that's demanding your attention. It's tugging your sleeve. It's hanging onto your coat. It's the voice that you cannot silence and you just you can't avoid it. You just have to go with it.
Presenter asks
2:23How has lockdown affected your working life this past year or so?
It has been a challenge. I think not only finding the sort of mental space to write, but actually the physical space to write, has been tricky. … I ended up hiding inside my youngest daughter's Wendy house, which is tiny. I couldn't even stand up, but I I crouched in there with my laptop on my knee and it was fantastic. Nobody found me for about two hours, apart from the cat, and he did not disturb me.
Presenter asks
4:50What sparked your interest in Shakespeare's son when you were a teenager?
So I was studying Hamlet at school for my higher English and I was lucky enough to have an absolutely brilliant teacher at school. Called Mr. Henderson. … And he just mentioned in passing one day that Shakespeare had had a son called Hamlet, who had died four or five years before Shakespeare wrote the play Hamlet. The idea of this lost son just really got under my skin, and I have a really clear memory of sitting in my very cold classroom in Scotland and looking down at the cover of the you know school issue play and putting my finger over the L. And thinking, well, it's the same name, and what does that mean? … But in that brief moment of him calling a play after his dead son, he becomes briefly visible as a human being.
The keepsakes
The book
Alice Munro
She has an absolutely extraordinary skill sentence by sentence. And I think what I love most of all is the generosity she shows towards her readers, and she gives in forty pages what novelists would spread out over four hundred. So I think this collection would sustain me on an island because it gives me such a multitude of voices and lines.
The luxury
Archaeology Department on Kildare Street
Amazing building, yeah Palladian building with the zodiac in the forecourt with the lots of different marble columns. It is absolute and I love museums and whenever I am traveling, when I used to travel, I always make sure I go to the museum and wherever I am, whether it's a small town or whether it's a big city. And this one is my favourite museum anywhere in the world. What I love about it most of all probably is the fact that a lot of the artefacts and the treasures are found not by archaeologists but by farmers who have been digging on their land. And it gives me an enormous sense of the overlapping stories of history and the long span of human narratives.
Presenter asks
8:25When you look back to the time you contracted viral encephalitis as a child, what do you remember most?
Anyone who's been through a severe illness will know that you are in a sense one person before it and you come out the other side as somebody else. You are reconfigured. … I I don't really have much of a sense of the child I was before actually because I I was just eight when I became ill. And when I emerged from it really, you know, when I was properly able-bodied again, I was probably ten.
Presenter asks
13:37Your experience left you with a stammer. Many stammerers say it gives them an excellent vocabulary. Was that the case for you?
Being a stammerer has been one of the most formative things, I think, in my life. … What it does give you is a very, very finely tuned hypersensitivity to words and also to grammar. … As a young child, you learn to become your own editor and you're doing it on the spot in your head all the time.
Presenter asks
17:19Was being a writer already your ambition when you applied to Cambridge?
It's funny, I don't think I have ever articulated to myself or anyone actually that I wanted to be a writer. I think that they're two separate things. I wanted to write, definitely, and I knew that. But the idea of being a writer is something different. I can't remember a time when I didn't have the urge to put something down on paper, to transpose experience or ideas or imagination into text on a page. That has always fascinated me.
“I think the best book you can possibly write is the one you can't not write.”
“I ended up hiding inside my youngest daughter's Wendy house, which is tiny. I couldn't even stand up, but I I crouched in there with my laptop on my knee and it was fantastic. Nobody found me for about two hours, apart from the cat, and he did not disturb me.”
“I've always felt that my life was a kind of bonus, that I was partly living on borrowed time, or that I was sort of slightly cheated the universe in a way, so and I was going to live the biggest and the best life I possibly could, within whatever limitations I've been given.”
“Being a stammerer has been one of the most formative things, I think, in my life.”
“I think what I love most of all is the generosity she shows towards her readers, and she gives in forty pages what novelists would spread out over four hundred.”
“I find it very important when I'm on my desert island to think about how long humans have been alive and also how important it is that we do all we can to ensure that we continue.”