Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a novelist and a critic. She was brought up in Sheffield in a family so

clever that her mother and father would think nothing of reciting words worth as

they served the Sunday lunch. Hardly surprising then that she should have picked up a

first-class degree from Cambridge and become an academic.

But she hasn't hidden her depth of learning behind university walls.

In short stories and novels, she's kept herself at the forefront of British literary life and last year was

rewarded with the Booker Prize. The novel with which she won it, possession, is the

story of the secret love affair of a distinguished Victorian poet and combines her academic erudition with her

creative vision. She is a. S. Bayet. How much effect has winning the book a

prize had on your life Antonia. It's been a mixture of

extreme pleasure. I've had hundreds of letters from all sorts of people who have

enjoyed the book and considerable irritation because of being constantly interviewed and the phone never stops going and people offer one good is it's not that one doesn't get offered nice things people ring up and say please come to Yugoslavia, please come to

Turkey, please spend three weeks in Australia, please come out to California. And all this is very, very

exciting but I feel I'm middle-aged and want to write another book and another book and it's rather horrid to have nice things appearing to be like persecution.

But has it had an effect on your work winning the prize in the sense that you now know you can write a

best-selling prize-winning novel? I think it has yes I think probably

everybody who wins it feels a bit inhibited because you think can I do it again

or will they be annoyed with me if I now do something of less general appeal?

What about the Desert Island then?

Does it hold any attractions for your talk?

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