Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. Our castaway today was part of that outburst of Northern Talent in the 60s which produced writers

like John Brane, Alan Silito, Davy's Story, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.

They along with the actors and the musicians were part of what can now be seen as something

of a cultural revolution. Today the participants in that revolution have generally

speaking departed the battlefield and headed south. Not so our castaway.

Since he made his name in 1960 with a novel called

a kind of loving, he's remained in his native Yorkshire, moving no further than a

few miles from his birthplace and writing to date eight novels and three volumes of short stories.

He is Stan Basto.

Stan, why have you never left the area that you were born in?

Well let me remind you of Roy Hattisley at the beginning of one of his essays,

that when I was a young man, I had one unique attribute.

I was convinced that there was something tender and romantic about Barnsley. And I think that if a writer in the north or in the regions finds his own sort of

of Barnsley you'll admit that was rich coming from a Sheffield, won't you? Absolutely.

And if the penny suddenly dropped that there is something tender or romantic about Barnsley or

about Dewsbury about Wakefield.

Well that's the kind of thing that happened to me when I suddenly realized that here was a whole mine of

material to work from to write about

enough certainly to last me the rest of my life.

I'd like to move about. I like to go abroad. I don't like to be tied down, but always there is that string holding me

...