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

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Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the poet and artist in Tiaz-Darka.

Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for her work, her life seems a perfect reflection of the interrelatedness of the Commonwealth.

Born in Pakistan, she was no more than a few months old when the family packed up their belongings and flew 4,000 miles to start a new life,

exchanging the blistering dusty lanes of Lahore for the blustery rain-slicked roads of Glasgow.

Her father worked hard and from scratch built a big

successful business and a comfortable life for his children. But the

immigrant fairy tale came undone when his restless well-educated and westernized daughter married in secret

running away to London and then Bombay, scandalised her parents discerned her.

She would never see her mother again. Her work centers on themes of freedom, cultural intolerance, everyday life and gender

politics. The poet she says sees the world at a different angle, perhaps always as a kind of foreigner or an outsider.

I think displacement is often a good and useful thing for a writer.

So welcome, and I wonder why do you think it is a useful thing? good and

I wonder why do you think it is a useful thing? I think it's quite good for poets not to be too comfortable.

Poetry has to live on the dangerous edges of things where you can see life at a slant and where you're really

hanging on by your fingernails so that you can write.

And Poets are great eavesdroppers on the world too, so of hearing things. That's a good way to come to

poetry because that's what poetry does as well. It tries to interpret the

heartbeat of the world. And given that you've described yourself as a

I love this a Muslim Calvinist hanging by your fingernails then with that

...