Rose Tremain

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 1997

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the novelist Rose Tremain. She began writing as a child soon after her father left home. It became a kind of therapy for her and she explains it's something she still turns to, especially in moments of crisis. Recognised for her ability to get right inside the minds of her characters, she offers the reader a view of the world through their eyes. In her book Sacred Country, we become a little girl who believes she's really a boy. In Restoration, we live the life of a 17th-century man. As a writer, she wants her work to feel dangerous, and so after extensive research she likes to forget it; keeping some facts and making others up. It's like playing a game with the reader, she says, a challenge to guess which is fact and which is merely fiction.

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

Favourite track: Dance Me To The End Of Love by Leonard Cohen Book: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Luxury: Word processor

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1997, and the presenter was Sue years old to fill the vacuum created when her father left home.
0:38.0	At university, Angus Wilson encouraged her to take risks, but it wasn't until she was 32 that she
0:44.3	published her first novel Sadler's birthday. She went on to be acclaimed as one of
0:49.2	Britain's best young novelists and write radio and television plays. Her fifth book, Restoration, was shortlisted
0:55.1	for the book a prize and made into a feature film starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Grant. These days
1:00.2	her books are bestsellers here, in France and in America. Her stories cover a
1:05.1	wide range of settings and characters. Writers, she says, should not be tourists
1:10.2	in the country of the imagination, but explorers and mountaineers.
1:14.0	She is Rose Tremaine.
1:16.0	It strikes me, though, Rose, you have to have great courage
1:18.0	to be an explorer or a mountaineer.
1:20.0	I mean, whatever happened to the adage that you have to experience
1:23.0	something in order to be able to write about it? Well I think some writers still
1:28.1	keep to this adage that unless they've experienced something they don't have the
1:31.2	authority to write about it.
1:33.0	I think I've never started with that premise.
1:35.0	I don't know why.
1:36.0	Probably it's incredibly foolhardy.
1:37.0	But I think that even with my first book,
1:40.0	when I look back now, I think there's a lot of myself in that book,
	...

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