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Desert Island Discs

Anne Enright, writer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.413.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering, in 2007, and was appointed the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction in 2015. She has written seven novels, two collections of short stories and a book of essays about motherhood and her work has been widely translated. Born in Dublin in 1962, Anne is the youngest of five children. She was a voracious reader from an early age, finishing every children's book at her local library. When she was 16, she won a scholarship to study at a school in Canada, and then returned to Ireland for a degree in English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. After taking an MA in Creative Writing at University of East Anglia, with teaching from Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, she worked for six years as a TV producer for the Irish broadcaster RTE. When her TV work left her feeling burned out, she began her writing career in earnest. Her book of short stories, The Portable Virgin, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1991, and she published her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, in 1995. Her latest novel, The Actress, is published in February 2020. She is also now a Professor at University College Dublin and teaches creative writing. She met her theatre director husband, Martin Murphy, at university and they have two children. DISC ONE: Brahms Intermezzos: Op. 117, No.1 by Glenn Gould DISC TWO: Jersey Girl by Tom Waits DISC THREE: A Case Of You by Joni Mitchell DISC FOUR: Then You’ll Remember Me by Dé Danann DISC FIVE: The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash DISC SIX: Hiawatha by Laurie Anderson DISC SEVEN: Tower of Song by Leonard Cohen DISC EIGHT: Soave sia il vento from Cosi fan Tutte, composed by Mozart, conducted by Karl Böhm, performed by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Walter Berry, Christa Ludwig and Philharmonia Orchestra. BOOK CHOICE: 'In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust LUXURY ITEM: High thread-count cotton sheets CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Soave sia il vento from Cosi fan Tutte, composed by Mozart Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

0:04.8

Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast.

0:08.4

Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take

0:13.2

with them if they were cast away to a desert island.

0:16.1

For right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.

0:20.4

I hope you enjoy listening.

0:30.9

Music Radio Music

0:42.3

My cast away this week is the author Anne N. Wright.

0:45.3

Irish culture and identity are rich veins in her work, along with family, sex, the body and

0:51.1

motherhood and these threads are part of a larger tapestry.

0:54.4

Exploring universal questions about human nature and exposing sometimes uncomfortable

1:00.3

in 2015 she became the inaugural laureate for Irish fiction, the public face of her home country's

1:06.3

literary life. They could hardly have picked a better candidate to represent the complexity

1:10.9

of contemporary island. Early on in her career, she decided that she could write about anything

1:15.9

because as she put it, nobody who considered themselves a keeper of the cannon would hear it.

1:20.8

It didn't quite work out that way. Her novel The Gathering won her the Booker Prize.

1:25.4

She says, the periphery has always been the more interesting place for me.

1:29.6

I didn't quite fit and that suited me. I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer,

1:34.5

but look what happened. Anne N. Wright, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

1:38.4

Thank you very much, Lauren. Your writing is often about change.

1:41.6

Why is it so important to you to look forward in that way?

1:44.4

I can't tell you how much I hate conservative work and how, you know, how hard it is sometimes

...

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