Ursula Owen

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 1997

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the editor and publisher, Ursula Owen. Twenty-five years ago she helped create Virago - the feminist publishing house which promotes women writers. A huge success, it became the focus of much attention when she and her colleague, Carmen Callil, fell out in what became a very public row. Recently, she has revamped the magazine Index on Censorship, which debates the issues surrounding freedom of speech and publishes the work of persecuted writers. The daughter of a Jewish family who fled to Britain from Nazi Germany, she was a quiet, reserved and conformist child. Her friends, she says, still wonder how she grew up to be such an outspoken, strong-minded and opinionated woman.

[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 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an editor and publisher. 25 years ago she and two others founded Virago,
0:37.0	the feminist publishing house which promoted the work of women writers, forgotten and undiscovered.
0:43.2	Enormously successful, it was eventually sold after she and one of her original partners,
0:48.1	Carmen Kalil, fell out in a spectacular public row.
0:52.3	For the past four years, she's been the editor of
0:54.5	Index on Censorship which champions the cause of persecuted writers transforming
0:59.4	it into a glossy and distinguished publication.
1:03.0	Brought up as a complete Englishwoman,
1:05.0	she is in fact the daughter of a German Jewish family
1:07.8	who fled here to escape from the Nazis.
1:10.2	She took some time to come to terms
1:12.0	with the contradictions of her unique upbringing.
1:14.4	To begin with, she says she tried hard to belong. Today, she enjoys being something of an outsider.
1:20.8	She is Ursula Owen. You were in fact Ursula born here in England, weren't you?
1:26.4	Although you were taken back to Germany as a child, was that incredible foresight on your
1:30.9	parents' part?
1:31.9	Yes, it was incredible foresight.
1:33.0	A friend of theirs actually suggested to my mother
1:36.0	even in 1933 just a hour after Hitler had got in
1:40.0	that my brother should be born in England
	...

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