Stephen King
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2006
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Stephen King. He's written more than 40 novels, won 23 major awards and sold hundreds of millions of books worldwide. He is best known for his tales of small-town America corrupted by the supernatural and macabre; with novels such as The Shining, Misery, Salem's Lot and Carrie making him a household name.
His first success came with Carrie - at the time he was scraping a living as a teacher, living with his young family in a trailer and writing short stories to supplement his income. He threw the first draft of Carrie in the bin and it was his wife Tabitha who fished it out and urged him to finish it. But with success came drug and alcohol abuse - and again it was his wife who intervened and encouraged him to stop. He nearly gave up writing after a road accident in 1999 which nearly killed him. But, to the delight of his legions of fans, he took up his pen again and the stories keep on coming.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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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 2006. My castaway this week is the author Stephen King to describe him as best-selling is to somewhat |
| 0:34.1 | underplay his achievements, he's written more than 40 novels, won 23 major |
| 0:38.8 | awards, and sold hundreds of millions of books worldwide. Described as one of the great |
| 0:44.2 | storytellers of our time he writes tales of small town America corrupted by the |
| 0:48.9 | supernatural and macabre with novels like The Shining, Misery, Salem's Lot, and Carrie, making him a household name. |
| 0:57.0 | But his battles with destructive forces haven't just been confined to the page. |
| 1:01.0 | During his most productive period as a writer, he was downing a case of Budweiser a night |
| 1:05.2 | along with any available drug he could get his hands on. Then in 1999 he was in a car |
| 1:10.3 | accident which nearly killed him and made him think of giving up writing for good. |
| 1:15.0 | Stephen King, given your considerable skills as a writer, you could write in many different genres. |
| 1:20.8 | Why do you want to make your readers scared? |
| 1:23.0 | I don't necessarily and I don't think that it's a given that you can write many different things. |
| 1:30.0 | I think that you're drawn in certain directions. |
| 1:34.0 | You know, in some ways I'm in a really good position because I've seen an arc of critical |
| 1:41.1 | approval for my work build over the years, which is a lot better, believe me, |
| 1:47.0 | than starting out with a big bank of critical approval and then frittering it away. You might then have the advantage or would have had many years ago |
| 1:56.1 | of people having a relatively low expectation of your work. As you say, you know, it's |
| 2:01.0 | filed under horror in a bookstore, so what do you expect? |
| 2:04.0 | One of the difficulties... |
| 2:05.0 | That's a very good point, by the way. |
... |
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