Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is the writer Vikram Seid. Born in Calcutta, he was a child prodigy, he says an insufferable child. His early years were divided between Britain and India and he studied at

Oxford and Stanford. He spent 11 years not getting a PhD, but he did learn Chinese, a bit of Welsh, the Indian flute and the cello.

He also mastered calligraphy and sculpture, sang German leader and wrote librettos.

In 1993, he brought out an epic tale about Indian family life in the 1950s, a suitable boy.

It had been eight years in the writing amounted to 1,349 pages and established him as a literary name to be reckoned with, bringing him legions of

fans and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. A sequel to his biggest literary hit is reportedly

now in the pipeline.

The fame for someone as unprolific as me, he says, is a cyclical fame.

I produce a book every five to six years, have my moment of celebrity,

and then I can disappear into a grateful

non-entity. I imagine Vikram's sake that millions of people are absolutely

delighted that they will be seeing the sequel to a suitable boy.

It is of course called a suitable girl.

Yes, what else?

I suppose it could have been called an unsuitable boy.

It could, maybe that's the one after.

That's right, part of a quartet.

Basically, when a suitable boy came out and did well, I didn't want to write

a sequel. Many years later I realized that the way I could interest myself in writing a sequel

...