Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. Her readers are children, so much so that this year she was appointed the Children's Laureate.

In the past 20 years she's written 40 books for children, won every important children's literary award, some of them twice, and enjoyed

the supreme accolade of having every one of her books remain in print. Her writing is comic but

with serious themes, family, relationships, divorce, child abuse, and through it she hopes to inculcate a culture of reading.

The book, she says, is not going to go away. She is Anne Fine. But the book can be made

into a tape or a film, Anne, and so avoid being read. Famously, of course, your Madam

Doubtfire was made into Mrs Doubtfire,

that wonderful vehicle for Robin Williams, which you didn't like very much, did you?

Well, no, but I was polite enough at the time to lie low and say nothing.

But isn't it the nature of films that they will always be slightly less than the book?

Oh I think they're far more than slightly less I think. I think tapes are fine because there you've got the whole words but I think what's wrong

with film is that all you see is what happens next and you see it as Joe Queen and says at the

producers speed and what people say but you don't

actually get underneath that you don't see what they're feeling what they're

really thinking what they might think they think something but actually be

feeling something underneath that they don't even know about.

Sure but do you fear that people can't be bothered anymore because they can't they don't

have to read Jane Austin they can see the films?

Well every time I get really, really depressed about this, I remember that, you know, more copies of Thackeray's Vanity Fair are sold in a year now than were read in his whole whole lifetime and I try and cheer myself up.

So what would you say to a child who said I don't really need to read because I see lots of

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