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 2008. My castaway this week is the children's author Alan Albergh, one of our most acclaimed

and successful writers, his creations offer wit, wisdom,

and just enough whimsy to capture young imaginations and the essential truth of childhood. Pippo, each peach pear plum and the jolly postman

are among the many works he produced in collaboration with his late wife,

the illustrator Janet Alberg.

He himself has been responsible for more than 140 titles selling tens of millions around the world.

It would seem it's his own vivid experience of childhood that has gone some way to enabling him to be the hugely popular

writer he has become.

He says, the best and the worst times of my life occurred I truly believe before I was 12 years old. Do you think that's generally the case or do you

think you had a particularly dramatic childhood?

I don't think I had a dramatic childhood and I think the quote that you just used comes

from a story of mine called my

brother's ghost. It does. Of course that's a character in the book rather than me

necessarily saying. But you have said the character is very much based on you. Yes and I

think is I do find that when I sit down with a pen in my hand

in a piece of paper in front of me, that my own childhood increasingly comes up

in front of me and I want to write about it.

The power and drama of things that happened to you, say before 12,

registers and goes down deep and stays there I think.

Working in collaboration, is that more satisfying than working alone? Collaborating with Janet was just wonderful because it was like a cottage industry.

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