Jacqueline Wilson

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2005

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Children's Laureate Jacqueline Wilson. She's won just about every award going for children's fiction and, in a career spanning more than 30 years, has written more than 80 books. Even as a child she knew she wanted to write but, after an inauspicious time at school, she reluctantly trained to be a secretary instead. Then she began to pitch ideas for a new teen magazine, Jackie, her stories were bought and she quickly became a staff writer. But she was 50 before she devised her most famous creation, Tracy Beaker. Tracy is a streetwise, feisty girl growing up in the competitive world of a children's home, who never loses the hope that one day her mum will come back for her. The book was a breakthrough for Jacqueline and its subsequent television adaptation introduced her to a mass audience. In 2002 she was awarded an OBE for services to literacy.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 5 in E flat by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The collected works by Katherine Mansfield Luxury: A fairground carousel

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer, she'd enjoyed a successful but not particularly unusual
0:34.8	career as a magazine and children's writer when in her mid-40s she published a book
0:39.1	called Tracy Beaker. It was the story of a 10-year-old living in a care home, unable to be fostered because she was
0:44.9	such a handful. It was a hit. And there were more such stories to come, stories that
0:49.9	grip their young readers with their realistic characters surviving their parents, divorce,
0:54.7	breakdown and illness.
0:56.7	She's become something of a heroine herself, adored by her fans, sometimes mobbed at book signings. She's won all the top prizes for
1:03.9	children's fiction, guardians, smarties and Blue Peter, and she's overtaken
1:07.5	Catherine Cookson as the most borrowed author from public libraries and
1:11.1	earlier this year she was named as the Children's
1:14.1	Lariat. She obviously knows her audience but then she says children are much more
1:19.6	knowing than we realize she is Jacqueline Wilson.
1:23.0	Jacqueline your fans don't just enjoy your books.
1:26.0	They devour them as I say they mob you.
1:28.0	You signed in one bookshop recently I think until midnight because the queue kept coming. How do you explain it?
1:35.0	Because you write about such, to use the phrase, gritty realism, why is it so popular?
1:41.0	I have no idea. My books are mostly about children who are odd ones out and I
1:45.9	suppose even the most happy confident child has moments of insecurity when they identify
1:52.3	with the sort of children I write about or maybe it's also that thing that even if you are very cozy very happy with your mom and dad you want to experience other people's lives and see how you'd manage in those circumstances?
2:04.3	Or fantasize perhaps about being a little bit unconventional, you know. I mean I think we all
	...

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