Jacqueline Wilson

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2005

⏱️ 36 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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0:34.9	check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:42.2	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:45.3	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
0:50.7	Music was Sue Lolly.
1:07.9	My castaway this week is a writer.
1:17.1	She'd enjoyed a successful but not particularly unusual career as a magazine and children's writer when in her mid-forties she published a book called Tracy Beaker.
1:22.6	It was the story of a 10-year-old living in a care home, unable to be fostered because she was such a handful.
1:28.1	It was a hit. And there were more such stories to come, stories that grip their young readers with their realistic characters surviving their parents' divorce, breakdown and illness.
1:33.3	She's become something of a heroine herself, adored by her fans, sometimes mobbed at book
1:38.4	signings. She's won all the top prizes for children's fiction, Guardian, Smarties, and Blue
1:42.9	Peter, and she's overtaken Catherine
1:44.7	Cookson as the most borrowed author from public libraries. And earlier this year, she was named
1:49.8	as the Children's Laureate. She obviously knows her audience, but then she says, children
1:55.7	are much more knowing than we realize. She is Jacqueline Wilson. Jacqueline, your fans don't just enjoy your books.
2:03.1	They devour them, as I say, they mob you. You signed in one bookshop recently, I think, until midnight,
2:08.6	because the queue kept coming. How do you explain it? Because you write about such, to use the phrase,
	...

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