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 2006. My castaway this week is artist and writer Quentin Blake. For more than 50 years his work as an illustrator has brought to life the

characters and fantastical happenings in some of our most treasured children's books.

His style is in itself almost a definition of childhood exuberance, subversive, chaotic and spirited.

Drawings with a degree of innocent optimism that can be almost painfully touching but never sickly sweet.

Quentin Blake, it's almost impossible to imagine books like James and the Giant Peach or the

B.F.G. without the drawings that seem to have sprung from your pen.

Is it a pen you use when your drawing?

It's mostly a pen I use. I use an assortment of things.

What I like best is a scratchy pen. It's an old-fashioned writing pen. It's called a Waverly

nib. And you can feel it when you're drawing. You know, you can feel the shapes that you're making and that's what I

mostly use but I mean as I get older do it more often I sometimes use read pens or

I use a quill a few years ago I was given a vultures wing feather and I thought this would make a marvelous quill.

So I cut it and drew vultures with it and since then I've been getting parrots feathers to draw parrots with and swans

feathers to draw swans with. But they're wonderfully scratchy things and the fact that they're

a little bit unreliable and you're not quite sure what they're going to do that makes

it more exciting you've got to be on your toes I read once that you drew something with

a boot's toothpick I presume that's not true oh no that's absolutely true

yes no I'd forgotten about that. It's before I knew about

quills. It was the first punch cover that I ever did, but that was before I discovered the joys of real quills from

real birds.

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