Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer acclaimed as one of only two to have won the Booker Prize twice.
On the island
Eight records
It's the first piece of jazz I ever, ever heard. And it's a little bit like reading Faulkner for the first time in that I didn't know this existed.
I went into, there was a store in Bacchus Marsh ... and I found these 78s ... and I played them and they were all wrong. They were not the right Elvis ones. And one of course these things that I'd bought were were the very first recordings that Elvis Presley made when he when he went into Sun ... Sun Records ... And so this particular the next track, That's Al Right Mama, I s I really love these days.
MessiahFavourite
Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford & Academy of Ancient Music
To listen to the Yallalulia Chorus now is like it's some enormous musical mona lisa cliche and yet if one tries really hard to get beyond that, I I certainly still feel the just the sheer sort of soaring glory of it
All during that period that I was living in Notting Hill, I used to begin each day's work listening to Bob Dylan. As I get older and listen to him more and more ... one realises his enormous skill ... the way in which the lyrics fight with each other, contradict each other. I just think he's a truly great artist.
I admire David Byrne as an artist so, so much and I think his work is continually original. He's a person of incredible personal integrity.
I went through at a certain time what became an incredibly public divorce, which was very painful ... And so at that particular time ... I got enormous comfort out of Dylan's Idiot Wind because I suddenly understood what he was writing about.
Of Cowboys, Pirates and Lawyers
Charlie played this for me, and it just makes me smile and laugh and be happy in a way. And I think one of the underlying things of it is probably ... is that you're listening to this guy singing in this very particular way, and he ha he does have a relationship with his father, you see.
Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
It is so moving that the person who's sort of lost and solitary should be joined and celebrated by this art. And so it's like he builds a sort of a cathedral around this man. And it goes right back to what I wanted to do at the very, very beginning of my writing life when I read Faulkner. And it is the thing of giving voice to the voiceless.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:04Writing then, not a vocation, but a decision. That's very unusual.
I certainly fell far from university into an advertising agency and found my I fell amongst writers or people who were writing at nights and at weekends and and I began to read, all at the same time. And to discover at that time ... William Faulkner say ... I couldn't have imagined anything like that even existed in the world. And to read this sort of jewel-like language and this man also giving voice to the voiceless, just made me sort of drunk. And I was determined that I would do exactly the same thing.
Presenter asks
3:06During the day [of the Booker Prize ceremony], what was occurring to you about the possibility of winning it twice?
I remember that when there was a possibility of winning it the first time for Oscar and Lucinda, I was just sick with anxiety. And when Oscar and Lucinda won, I uh felt like I'd been run over by a truck ... Then the years go on, you know, and you think, Black, I was such a fool. And then I was given this second chance. And when I did win it for uh True History of the Kelly Gang, I really celebrated it. I was really I I was very, very, very happy.
Presenter asks
5:42The corner of Australia that you grew up in. Where was it and what was it like?
The keepsakes
The book
W. G. Sebald
Because it is so extraordinarily beautiful, complicated that one reads and reads. I've read it three times, and I'm still finding fundamental structural things about it.
The luxury
it's steak and kidney ... and if you turn around twice it becomes plumbed off and never runs out.
Well, it's a little town with the cutesy name at this distance of Bacchus Marsh. It's thirty-three miles due west of Melbourne in the middle of farming country which was wheat and sheep for the most part. And my father sold cars to farmers ... And we had a little business in the middle of this town and my mother worked downstairs in the spare parts department and men would arrive wanting to see the manager ... And she would say, I am the manager. And daily, daily, my mother fought this battle with men who would not really acknowledge that she was in charge.
Presenter asks
9:41What happened between the boy in school and the boy at university?
Well, it was just a different sort of science, I guess. And it was way more mathematical and way more abstract ... I declared that I was gonna I was gonna become a zoologist because it was all the same subjects. But the zoologists read books and new painters and were generally much more sort of bohemian. And they went to the pub and got drunk and we I like them.
Presenter asks
14:06You don't seem to use your writing to [explore yourself].
I'm very bored by the notion of of ... I think there's a huge difference between sort of art and self-expression. And I'm not really very interested in writing about myself or exploring myself. I'm interested in making something new and I hope beautiful that never existed in the world before. And I'm interested in moving so far beyond what I know. And that's why it's thrilling to me.
Presenter asks
15:27Did you feel that you would almost have to go away to do it properly?
By the time it was my turn, I didn't have to do that. I did come to this country, but it wasn't really to flee anywhere, it was just an Australian thing to want to experience the rest of the world, which was so unimaginable that when I got to Greece and saw they had tomatoes and cucumbers, I was astonished.
“I think there's a huge difference between sort of art and self-expression. And I'm not really very interested in writing about myself or exploring myself. I'm interested in making something new and I hope beautiful that never existed in the world before.”
“It is amazing how far you can move from yourself and how you can imagine what it is to be other, because after all, I think that's the job description. That's the game.”
“The notion that so many people that one meets and talks to have another home in their heart, too. And we share that ... The fact that we've got a second home and our heart is in another place as well. That's who we are.”