Josephine Cox

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2005

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the novelist Josephine Cox. Josephine Cox is one of Britain's most popular authors. She became an overnight publishing sensation at the relatively late age of 43 and has written 34 books which have sold 15 million copies worldwide. Now, her publishers print 'bestseller' on the cover of each new work, they're so confident of its success.

But it was by no means a straightforward route to fame and fortune. She was born in Blackburn during World War II and grew up in dire poverty. As a child, she used to charge her school friends a penny for her to tell them a story, she and her siblings slept six to a bed, and they used to drink water out of jam-jars. One of her teachers recognised her talents and prophesied her future success as a writer. But it was only decades later when, convalescing after an illness, she had the time to pick up a pen and write. Her first book was accepted immediately and she has been writing two books a year ever since.

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

Favourite track: Imagine by John Lennon Book: "A book which is in my head about my brother" Luxury: Photo album of my family

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 novelist at the age of 42 with her husband's business in
0:34.2	ruins and her health and their whole way of life under threat, she wrote her first
0:38.8	book. The rest is best-selling history. Since then she's written another 33 novels and sold 15
0:45.6	million copies worldwide. Her work is second only to Harry Potter as the most popular in Britain's
0:51.2	lending libraries. Her stories are romantic, often set against a backdrop
0:56.4	of poverty and hardship in the north of England. It's a world she knows well. She was brought up in
1:01.9	desperate circumstances in Blackburn,
1:04.2	where every waking moment it seems was a battle for survival. As a child she charged
1:09.6	her school friends a penny to listen to her stories. These days she's paid rather more than that.
1:15.2	When I write a book she says I live and breathe it I'll never stop. She is Josephine Cox and the books
1:22.0	just pour out of you Joe do they you can't stop?
1:25.0	No I can't it is like living and breathing it's part of my nature it's the
1:30.7	stories are there from when I was four years of age. I would sit on the steps down
1:35.0	Dairwent Street and I'd watch the whole world unfold around me. People making loving
1:40.8	doorways, children fighting, dogs we we in against the gutter, everything.
1:45.0	It all happened down to Irwin Street.
1:47.6	And all the stories of all the characters that lived down that street, they all come out in the books.
1:54.0	And you've written 34 so far. I mean, have you got more planned?
1:58.0	Are they all there or just waiting? No such thing as writer's block.
2:01.0	No, touch wood, no, they are all waiting and you know I'd have to
	...

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