Hello, I'm Krestey 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 cast away this week is a writer, the story he tells is his own, that of a child brought

up in the grinding poverty of a limerick slum surrounded by death, disease and fear.

He wrote it five years ago in New York where he spent the last

50 years having escaped to the city on stolen money at the age of 19. Now he's a

literary lion, a multi-millionaire and a pullet surprise winner.

I was given the gift of a miserable childhood and a certain way with words, he says,

but it took me a long time to find the voice to write my life story with simplicity and clarity

without adornment.

He is the author of Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt.

That's what you did, of course, Frank.

You wrote it, that kind of stream of consciousness of a child

You know how did you find that voice? I suppose a lot of it as a result of of all the years I spent in the classroom. I figured out that I had in my teaching career 11,000 American teenagers sitting in seats before me and when you're dealing with them your

delivery your presentation has to be simple and clear and it has to grip them

and grab them and be dramatic.

I've always been scribbling in notebooks

and trying to write this book for years.

I wrote a version of it about 30 years ago called,

If you live in a Lane. It wasn't bad, but it was a version of it about 30 years ago called if you live in a lane it wasn't bad but it was literary

Lane meaning slum in terms yeah the lane it was it was derivative and I was going through my

Sean O'Casey period my my James Joy's period, my William Faulkner,

...