Pat Barker

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the Booker prize-winning novelist Pat Barker. Pat Barker was 39 when she had the phone call every writer dreams about - her first book, Union Street, was to be published. The book went on to be made into a film, Stanley and Iris, with Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. Initially she wrote about the hard lives of working-class, Northern women, and the compromises some made in order to survive. But she became a household name for her Regeneration trilogy about World War I and its aftermath - the final book in the series, The Ghost Road, won the 1995 Booker prize.

In Desert Island Discs she discusses her writing, her inspiration, the importance of her grandparents in her upbringing and what it was like growing up as a 'mistake' - a war-time baby born to her unmarried mother.

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

Favourite track: Dawn (The First of Sea Interludes) by Benjamin Britten Book: Book on tropical fish to identify them Luxury: Snorkelling equipment

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer. At the age of 11 she dropped a penny in a wishing well
0:36.2	and asked to become a novelist. Nearly 30 years later the wish came true. She published
0:41.3	a book called Union Street, a brutal picture of the
0:44.4	Northeast in which she grown up, a world inhabited by poverty, child rape, wife beating
0:49.7	and neglect. It was a great critical success and other novels with similar themes followed, but worried about being pigeonholed, she turned away from her roots to write about something quite different, the First World War, and she produced a famous trilogy, the third of which the
1:05.2	Ghost Road won the book a prize. Her books are strong and their plain speaking. Her themes are trauma and survival. The influences she says that continue to haunt,
1:16.8	distort and occasionally redeem the present. She is Pat Barker. It was obviously a penny well spent, Pat, that penny you put down the wishing well.
1:27.0	It certainly was.
1:28.0	Did you know that you could write or did you just like the idea of being a writer?
1:33.0	I loved reading, I suppose.
1:35.0	I regularly got through a book a day at that stage of my life, all kinds of different books.
1:39.0	And I suppose it was natural when I thought about what I wanted to do in the future.
1:44.0	I enjoy this so much, why don't I do it too?
1:47.0	But there was nothing in my family background really which would have encouraged me to think that
1:51.0	writing was a possible career.
1:52.8	Well, quite, how did you think you were going to do it?
1:54.8	How did you think you were going to make a living?
1:56.2	Because that's what your life would have been geared towards.
1:58.0	Well, when I told my grandma who basically brought me up that I was going to be a writer,
2:02.4	she was very, very skeptical and quite rightly so and said yes, but you've got to earn your living as well, you know.
	...

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