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Alan Hollinghurst
It's seven years since Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, his novel which chronicled hedonism, money and class in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s.
The Stranger's Child
His new book, The Stranger's Child, is an ambitious work which charts the lives of two families over the course of the 20th century, set against the run-up to key moments such as the First World War, the General Strike and the Sexual Offences Act.
So do our panel believe it's been worth the wait? -
Mervyn Peake
John Sessions gives us his personal experiences and opinions on 20th century cult author Mervyn Peake, what it was like to play Dr Prunesquallor and how he became immersed in the monstrously mutated world of Gormenghast.
The Mervyn Peake Archive at the British Library -
Philip Roth
In an extended interview Kirsty Wark meets up with American author and winner of this years Man Booker Prize, Philip Roth in his Connecticut home to discuss his books, his life and the controversies that have surrounded him.
Philip Roth on the Man Booker Website -
Julia Donaldson
Martha Kearney joins author of the Gruffalo and newly appointed Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson at her old school in Camden to talk about Academy nominations, literary success in Children’s Fiction and what being Children’s laureate actually means.
The Julia Donaldson Website -
Kirsty Wark's Philip Roth Blog
The last and only time I interviewed Philip Roth, in New York two years ago, it was a dispiriting experience. The only place he would agree to talk was in the suite of offices housing his literary agents in an anonymous skyscraper in Manhattan. The room assigned to us had less charm than the police interview rooms you see on CSI, and they’re probably vamped up just a tad. It was windowless, airless, ill lit, greyish, an ugly acrylic carpet was topped by a metal table and two chairs, and the walls were made of dull pale grey fibre panels ( this is poor homage - Roth likes a list or two). The interview was efficient, but not expansive.
By contrast, this visit to the US, on the occasion of his winning the International Man Booker Prize for Fiction, was sensory overload. My editor Greg Sanderson and I drove from Newark to Connecticut on freeways that were eventually festooned with trees, and pitched up at a picturesque inn Roth had recommended, besides the similarly named Hopkins Winery, on the shore of Lake Waramaug,a little way from his house. The lake was still but for the odd motor boat trailing tryes or water skis, and it was dotted with small houses and moorings, with only a few McMansions despoiling the tree line. We met for dinner at his favourite local restaurant, the West St Grill in Litchfield, which would have been worth the journey itself, and the warm welcome, and hug, the owner, James Kafferman, gave Philip Roth was my first inkling that the oft repeated description of Roth as a recluse, leading a solitary, lonely life, was somewhat wide of the mark.
Roth was an entertaining dinner companion, anything but the carnaptious grumpster, again of repute, musing on everything from Obama, and what might secure him a second term, to one of my favourite books, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and the fact that Pulitzer prize winning Stegner, elderly and all but ignored, had eventually disappeared into his own disappointments. Roth encouraged us in our menu selections,( he eats there every few days) taking obvious delight in the food, and then, as easily as he had arrived he slipped away, bidding us farewell, with the invitation to come to his house and studio as early as we liked the next morning.
Roth’s eighteenth century home is along a winding country road but it is nothing like the shack deep in the woods that I expected – less Lars Von Trier’s horror movie house in Antichrist, more restrained clapboard elegance – in an utterly beautiful setting. He’s not an author I associate with expansive descriptions of nature, but he is a most knowledgeable guide, and the ancient trees around his saltbox house are obviously treasured silent companions. We filmed as we wandered around his studio – he has a set of letters which usually form a frieze in American classrooms, and he explained that he looks to them when he is at a loss in his writing, and he goes backwards from the book to the page, to the paragraph, the sentence , the word and then finally to the letter. Then we sat on the porch outside his studio to talk, relatively free of the bug attacks which intensify during the day. We had found the chairs in his house where he has retreated to a bright homely kitchen while the builders repair extensive storm damage in the house. At his studio, we had stolen a march on the bugs with our early start, but they can make life even in rural Connecticut a misery.
However what became ever clearer over the course of the next two hours was that Roth’s roots in the home he has owned since the early seventies were as deep as the oldest rrees, and that the much garlanded writer who returned from London after almost a decade, because he needed and missed and loved America, has done travelling. Philip Roth will never leave these shores again, where he still has friends ( though as he said they are dying off) and family. He had many more surprises, not least that he still panics when the ideas and words wont flow, and that he’d rather be lonely than suffer friction that he insists accompanies a relationship.
In our conversation we ranged over anti semitism, misogyny, and his family, old people, death and sex, and books to come.
When I raised Carmen Calill’s noisy exit from the International Man Booker judging panel, in protest at the choice of Roth, insisting he did not rate as a writer at all, he merely shrugged and said, “non importa.” And it’s hard to agree that Roth, whose different books you might sometime love or loathe, ( and some I do love and others I can leave) is not a towering figure in American literature. -
The Worlds of Mervyn Peake Exhibition at the British Library
Mervyn Peake (1911-68) is best known as the creator of Gormenghast, but he was also an accomplished painter, playwright, illustrator and poet. Using materials from the British Library’s collections, this exhibition examines his achievements through the prism of the worlds he inhabited, both real and imagined.
The British Library Website
Credits
- Interviewed Guest
- Alan Hollinghurst
- Interviewed Guest
- Philip Roth
- Presenter
- Martha Kearney
- Presenter
- Kirsty Wark
- Participant
- John Carey
- Participant
- Kate Mosse
- Director
- Janine O'Connor
