Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio Broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4.

My cast away this week is the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Alice Walker.

Author poet feminist and activist, it was her novel, The Color Purple,

that brought her worldwide attention and acclaim.

The story of a poor black girl surviving in the Deep American South between the wars,

it is a landmark work, disturbing and exhilarating, in equal measure.

If one subscribes to the idea that art is a wound turned to light,

then Alice Walker's early life proved crucial to her future creations.

Shot and blinded in one eye by her brother's BB gun, it was through the isolation of her injury that she began to write.

She once described poetry as medicine.

She has also said, I know the world's amest, but there's so much that's gorgeous in it.

I wish everybody could have what I have.

Alice Walker, when you said that, I'm guessing that you didn't have in mind conventional success as it's judged.

What is it that you have that you value so much?

I'm actually a happy person, and I love being on this planet.

I love this place that we somehow miraculously arrived at.

It just seems incredible to me.

And I feel that almost every moment, but at least once at least a day,

you have an extraordinary skill of conjuring up these vivid characters for the page.

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