You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

In anybody's book he's one of the giants of modern American literature. The New York Times once

called him the most important new writer since Shakespeare.

And to my guest today, he's been a lifetime's guiding star.

Writing at its best is a lonely life.

Organizations for writers

palliate the writers loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.

He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.

For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity or the lack of it each day.

Ernest Miller Hemingway speaking in 1954 receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, a man who loved fishing, shooting,

boxing and bullfighting. He wrote, for instance, a farewell to arms for whom the bell tolls,

the old man and the sea. And it was while reading these books for his A levels that the man with me now first came across Hemingway and later went on to write,

I felt I'd grown up a little. I lost my literary virginity. Books would never be quite the same again.

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