Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin.

Listen on 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.

My Castaway this week is the cartoonist writer and illustrator Posey Simmons.

Her razor-sharp wit and merciless social observation first came to prominence in the Guardian,

where among their stripped pine lentils and patchwork, she depicted the lives of prototype woolly liberals Wendy and George Weber. Since then, she's gone on to create highly

acclaimed children's books and graphic novels and has been described as one of the world's

most sophisticated contemporary cartoonists, mixing her acute observations on our up-to-date morays with allusions

to Flobert and Hardy. Posey Simmons, you once described yourself as a visual engineer.

I think that's a very interesting phrase. What did you mean by that? It was on a census form

quite a long time ago. And my husband also described himself as a visual engineer.

We thought that in future, when the census forms were looked at,

people would know what that was, that we engineered the visual.

And it seems a very precise phrase.

And what you do has great precision to it,

not just in the pictures, but in the words too.

Do you agonise over every detail?

I try to get things accurate.

I hope people will recognise immediately who the people are that I'm drawing and what they're like,

just from maybe what they're wearing, all the details that they have in their kitchen.

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