You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.

My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.

The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.

With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to helping

you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put together

by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life,

check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista 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 2008.

Music My castaway this week is the writer Peter Carey.

He is one of the most highly acclaimed authors in the English language and is one of only two to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice.

He's Australian, but has spent much of his life living abroad

for a short time in Britain and for many years in America,

although his homeland still draws him back and inspires him.

His upbringing there was on the face of it conventional,

but he was always slightly at odds with his family, a bit out of place at school, and totally out of his depth at university.

In the end, he drifted into a job in advertising, and then one day he declared he was going

to become a writer. I just decided it was what I was going to do, and I'm an obsessive fool.

Having announced I was going to do it, I was determined to do it.

So Peter Kerry, writing then, not a vocation but a decision, that's very unusual.

Well, it was a little more complicated or a little more obvious in the sense that I certainly fell far from university into an advertising agency and found my, I fell amongst writers or people who were writing at nights and at weekends and I began to read all at the same time.

And to discover at that time, William Faulkner, say,

...