Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist who won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger and also writes short stories.
On the island
Eight records
Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben (from Zaide)Favourite
an aria from Mozart's opera Zaida... partly in honour of my daughter, who's an oboeist... a duet between oboe and voice.
Weihnachtshistorie (Christmas Story) (excerpt)
a piece of vicarious anguish... my son sang the angel part... can't hear it ever without that feeling of awful sort of sinking in the stomach.
Mein Schlafengehen (from Four Last Songs)
a piece of, in a sense, nostalgia. This was a piece of courtship music for me.
again more oboe music. Josephine, my daughter, played this... vicarious anxiety.
Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (Shepherd on the Rock)
I have a passion for the human voice... I can't sing in tune.
Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1
I think I would need something soothing on this island.
Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra
Uplift that one would definitely need on this island.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:19Do you believe writers are born rather than made?
I don't think that you can. Teach yourself to write or learn to write, but at the same time I think that that writers are in a constant state of learning and improvement, as it were. I think you start to write probably because there's something in you, there's some innate passion to do it. What you then spend the rest of the time doing is honing it down, is learning how to do it.
Presenter asks
11:33Tell me about winning the Booker Prize. You'd been shortlisted twice before, hadn't you?
Yes, I had. And the first time was a a long time ago, about ten years ago, when there was far less commotion about it. It was all rather low key and … Tranquil then. And indeed, you were told beforehand that you hadn't won. I was told with a certain satisfaction by my publisher that I hadn't won, because in fact one of his other authors had won. Who was that? That was Paul Scott. That was the Raj Quartet. That's right, yes, it was for one book of that. And yours was The Road to Litchfield, which was your first novel. It was. So that, yes, it was very exciting to have it recognised in this way. Incredible, really, for a first novel, wasn't it? … Well, it was encouraging.
Presenter asks
14:21A friend of mine says he finds your leading females extremely sexy. How do you react to that?
The keepsakes
The book
Herman Melville
I think I would take Moby Dick. Because obviously one would need a large book in every sense. And Mobedick is an immensely long book. It's also one of the largest novels in scope that there is. It's something that would give me a vast amount of food for thought, and I would never get to the bottom of it, so that it would bear the number of re-readings that it would have to have.
The luxury
I've always assumed that this island is in the South Pacific, so presumably it's bird infested, and I've always been a an enthusiastic amateur bird watcher, so my luxury would simply be a pair of binoculars.
Oh, that's interesting. Certainly. Claudia in Moontiger provokes violent extremes of feeling in people and men do react very strongly. Either they can't abide her or they think she's marvellous. Yes, they have that response and they find her very sexy, which I think probably says more about them than about her.
Presenter asks
16:51You said your childhood was rather strange and you had no formal education. Can you tell us about that?
I didn't go to school in Egypt. There allegedly there was no school for me to go to, so I w I was educated at home entirely by a sort of governess who um Did it through a kind of Do it yourself education kit, which was sent out from England … And these were administered in a very kind of haphazard way … [but] the curious thing is that that haphazard as it was, in fact for me it was just the right thing, because it was a an education based entirely on narrative … it taught me to to listen, to read, to control language. It was profoundly short on Science … And there was very little mathematics … So when I did eventually get to a to a proper school, to a boarding school, I was technically, as it were, behind, but in a curious way also advanced in that that I was very good at reading and writing.
Presenter asks
23:30Where do all the ideas come from? You say you pluck them out, but where do they come from?
I don't go out and look for a novel, in a sense. It seems to arise from the things that I've been thinking about and the way that I'm looking at the world. But often the structure or or the subject or the um the story even is prompted by something seen. The book that I'm working on at the moment, which is a a London novel, was in one sense sparked off by a painting … a painting by my aunt, Rachel Reckitt … it acted in a sense as a prompt.
Presenter asks
31:49Would you be happy to be called a woman writer, or do you care to be pigeon-holed?
Not particularly, no. Uh I think this is a fairly meaningless expression. After all, one doesn't talk about men writers. I'm I'm simply a novelist, and and and that's it. Except that if one picked up one of your books and didn't know uh who had written it, and I'm sure that after I feel sure that after a few pages one would know it was a woman writing. I agree with you. I think that's true, and I would say the same of other kinds of writers, both men and women. I don't know what it is, what particular gender quality it is that makes itself apparent in in fiction, but it it certainly does. … one would feel that in the middle in in and in literary fiction there shouldn't be this definable gender distinction, but patently there is. I wish I knew what it was.
“I think you start to write probably because there's something in you, there's some innate passion to do it. What you then spend the rest of the time doing is honing it down, is learning how to do it.”
“I felt totally and utterly displaced, and and I was about twelve, going on thirteen. felt totally like a refugee and was sent immediately, or almost immediately, to boarding school, which was a fairly brutal experience for a child who hadn't been to any kind of school. In fact, it was completely horrific.”
“The whole ethic being put into at this school was that affection for literature and enjoyment of literature, or indeed of learning really, was a perversion and that a nice girl and a healthy, decent girl got out and played lacrosse.”
“The one thing you do learn after a number of books is that it does somehow unhitch itself, or so far it has done.”
“I've always assumed that this island is in the South Pacific, so presumably it's bird infested, and I've always been a an enthusiastic amateur bird watcher, so my luxury would simply be a pair of binoculars.”