Hello, I'm Kesti 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 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a writer. At the centre of her work is the partnership

she's enjoyed for nearly 40 years with the film director James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant.

She's written most of the films they've made together, some based on her own novels.

She was born into a Jewish family in Germany, lived in England from the age of 12,

spent the first 24 years of her married life in India, and now lives mainly in New York.

She won the Booker Prize in 1975 for her novel Heat and Dust.

That and the names of other films she has written make her work familiar, Shakespeare Waller,

a room with a view, how it's end, and the remains of the day, to name just a few.

She's always lived as a foreigner, blown from country to country, culture to culture.

As it happens, she says, I like it that way. She is Ruth Prava Jabvala.

You're a very solitary person, Ruth, but you've always had a family, it seems to me,

not least this film company Merchant Ivory. You've been together for 38 years,

since you made your first film. Is it like a family? Is that the relationship you have with the other two?

Oh, yes, absolutely, yes. We all live in the same apartment house in New York.

I mean, when anybody's there, because they're always on location or somewhere,

because I'm away for three to four months or so.

But nevertheless, I think you're in the Guinness Book of Records as the film production company

that's been together longest.

Oh, yes.

What do you put its success down to? Why? Why has it worked?

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