Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My cast away this week is the artist and writer Edmund Duval. His ceramics are on display

in many of the world's major museums and indeed in many of the world's swankiest homes.

Delicate pots in shades of white and cream, informed he says by a great deal of

thinking about literature. In turn, the written work he's produced has got plenty

people thinking and won him several awards. His book, The Here With Amber Eyes,

traced the rich and dramatic story of his family's Russian Jewish heritage and diaspora in Odessa, Paris, Vienna and Tokyo.

He says, I make pots and I write. I'm not one of those people who by mistake became a potter or by mistake is a writer.

They are both completely entwined.

And so as somebody who is recognized in both fields at a high level then,

how do you juggle the writing and the ceramics?

It doesn't feel like a juggling act at all.

It's really very odd to say this, but it's very easy for me to walk from my wheel having made a board of pots and sit down and read or begin to make notes of something I'm writing and they all happen in the same

space so it doesn't feel like I'm being wrenched from one thing into another they do

absolutely feed each other so juggling yes but but it doesn't feel demanding in that sense of having to make

choices the whole time.

And you say rigorous yet quite passionate and humane, that's what I want people to think when they look at my pots.

That's a really intriguing phrase.

Well, rigorous, yes, because I mean, for going to sake, I spent

almost 40 years making these things now,

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