AS Byatt and The Children's Book

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The perfect childhood and the failure of utopian experiments in living in Edwardian England were explored by AS Byatt in her 2009 novel The Children's Book. In this conversation with Matthew Sweet recorded in that year, they discuss her writing life, mythologising childhood and her meetings with Iris Murdoch, about whom she wrote two critical studies. A lecturer in English literature, AS Byatt's books drew on a wide range of reading and visiting art galleries and museums. In 1990 she won the Booker prize for her novel Possession.

You can find other conversations with writers on the Free Thinking programme website in a collection called Prose, Poetry and Drama

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I just say?
0:01.5	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:04.0	It's such a wonderful listen.
0:05.6	So nice.
0:06.5	There are loads more like it on BBC sounds.
0:08.8	Different paces, different heights.
0:10.6	The roof is buckling.
0:11.9	Where you can also listen to live sports commentary.
0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.6	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:34.9	Dame Antonia Susan Bayett.
0:37.3	A.S. Byatt on the covers of her fiction and nonfiction,
0:41.6	or, as she preferred in the studio, A.S. Biot first and Antonia thereafter. Booker Prize winner,
0:49.2	that's the fact that always comes first, but foremost, I would say, a curious, rare and generous mind.
0:56.9	She was a frequent visitor to our studio to talk about Flobear, about Ragnarok, genetics,
1:03.5	the ghost stories of M.R. James, anything, really. Tonight's free thinking revisits the one
1:09.8	occasion in 2009,
	...

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