Hello, I'm Cresti 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 1997 and the presenter was Sue Lolli

My cast away this week is a novelist, prolific, popular and highly acclaimed. His story is a

full of mystery, violence and strange characters. Very different from their author, the self-confident

only child of an easygoing Scottish couple who always wanted to write. He eventually had

his first book, The Wasp Factory, published when he was 30 and working as a junior clerk

in a law firm. Since then, his mainstream books have always been in the top ten bestseller

lists. Complicity was number one. The Crow Road was made into a television series and

he also writes highly successful science fiction novels.

For porting to be something of a slacker, he says he writes because he likes it. I'm

too busy enjoying it, he says, to actually analyse it. He is Ian Banks. It seems to me

that you're the sort of writer who would make a budding writer, Suey Sidel, because apparently

you just knock off these books in a couple of months and take the rest of the year off.

I know, yes, the first thing my editor said to me when we were back in 1983, in fact, when

The Wasp Factory was accepted, and he said, I hope fast to you, and I said, oh, knock

off a book in two or three months, and he said, God, see, my dear boy, lie, you know, you

shouldn't say this, but I'm not having the brain power to lie and remember what my lies

are. I think, you know, four-bike of the truth, you know, three-nose of moral scruples,

just because it's more efficient. So I'm afraid that is the sad truth.

And do you write as quickly as you speak, do you?

Yes, I can record all the slow down. Yes, fairly quickly. My quote of these days is 15,000

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