Hello I'm Kirstie 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 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. She was, she says, a feminist from the age of five. She also believes she can predict things.

The events that happen in your dreams, can she claims, be more important than those which take place in your waking life.

She came to writing comparatively late. than those which take place in your waking life.

She came to writing comparatively late.

Her first book, The House of the Spirits,

was written when she was 39.

It's since been translated into 27 languages

and sold in its millions. Today voluntarily exiled

from her native Chile she lives and writes in California but her books still

evoke the turbulent country she's left behind. She is Isabel Ayende.

Isabelle, in fact, you didn't so much dream that you would meet your present husband as

writing a book how it would happen didn't you?

When I wrote Eva Luna, I brought up this character Ralph Carlain to her life under circumstances

and the character resembles a little bit my own husband. But that's a coincidence. I don't think I predicted that. Don't you? Just happened. But you have predicted things or at least written things in your books that have subsequently proved to be true as if somehow you knew them but there were things that you had no knowledge of.

No, but I think that happens to most writers. When you spend a lot of time alone in a room focused on a project,

concentrated in silence, things happen. I think you tap into a collective unconscious a collective dream a collective hope and you get things that you would never get in normal times

You do do you think that's true of all writers many writers I have talked to other

writers and many people do I'm more aware of it because I come from a family

that was very

and my grandmother. She spent her life experimenting with telepathy,

...