Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer, radical, energetic and versatile, she's led a life as

rich as the century itself. Brought up in a privileged academic environment before the

first world war, she married at 18 and from then on devoted

her life to new ideas. She helped pioneer birth control, owned a deep-sea fishing trawler,

and became the advisor to an African tribal chief. But it's through her

books, her family and her friends that she has achieved her reputation. The

daughter, sister and mother of distinguished scientists, she mixed in the 30s with people such as

W.H. Orden, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Today, with more than 90 books to

her name, she's changed her recreation in Who's Who from a little danger to keeping

up with the family. A gentle indication that at the age of 93 the whirlwind pace of her life is beginning to slacken a little. She is

Naomi Mitchison. You've written Naomi novels and children's stories and poetry and

as many books I think as you are years old. You must have spent your whole life writing.

Yes, I think that's just about it.

But how have you found time producing a large family and entertaining a social circle at the same time?

Well, probably because I can write anywhere and on any bits of paper with any pencils or pens which are about. I used to find that going around in the circle

in the underground was a very good way of not being interrupted.

What's sitting on the circle line?

On a circle.

Endlessly going round.

But I do write very quickly when I get going.

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