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 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a novelist. In her long life, she's in her late 80s, she's

published more than 50 books, many of them set in India, where she lived for much of

the first half of her life. They reflect her own experiences, clashes between parents and children, prejudice, sexual jealousy and poverty.

Her most famous novel, Black Narcissus, was a huge success when it was published in 1939. It, like the River and the Green

Gage Summer, was turned into a popular film. One of her more recent works, The

Peacock Spring, was dramatised on BBC One this year and the latest is on her window sill in

Scotland waiting to be sent to the publishers. Popular and enduring rather than

critically acclaimed, she once said that one of the advantages of never being fashionable is that you can never be out of fashion.

She is rumor-gotten. And it's difficult to say you have ever been out of fashion rumor because you've been permanently in print for years now,

yes. There's one thing that I and my contemporaries wanted for our books.

Wasn't money or success, though of course we wanted those, but it was

for the books to last. And I have had, luckily for me, a little taste of that.

Black Nonsense was written in 1938,

and it has never been out of print in some part of the world since.

So that's what 48 49, nearly 50 years?

Nearly 50 years.

But you haven't as I said in that introduction necessarily been

critically acclaimed for example Margaret Drabble hasn't included you in her

companion to English literature does that irritate you at all?

No because I can quite understand it.

...