Vikram Seth

Kirsty Young's castaway is the author Vikram Seth.

His novel A Suitable Boy was nearly a decade in the writing, but it was a huge and immediate hit and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He is now working on a follow-up novel called A Suitable Girl. He's due to finish work on it in 2013 - 20 years after the original work was published. The pace of work, he admits, is slow: "The sound of deadlines pushing past is one of the sounds that authors are most familiar with - it's very much in the gestational period."

Choices

1.

The Beach Boys

Fun, Fun Fun

Composer: Wilson/Love

Others who chose this artist

2.

Lata Mangeshkar

Ab Raat Guzarne Vali Hai -The Night will Fade into Dawn

Composer: Shankar Jaikshan & Hasrat Jaipuri

Others who chose this artist

3.

Castaway's favourite

BBC Sound Archive

Nightingales and Lancaster Bombers recorded in a Surrey Wood

Composer: On Location in 1942

4.

Franz Schubert

Erster Verlust

Artist: Ian Bostridge - with Julius Drake on the piano

Others who chose this artist

5.

Johann Sebastian Bach

St Matthew Passion - Am Abend, da es kuhle war

Artist: Cornelius Hauptmann -with the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner

Others who chose this artist

6.

Bach

Partita for Solo Violin No.3 in E Major

Artist: Philippe Honore

7.

Mark Padmore

Thoughts While Travelling at Night

Composer: Alec Roth with words by Vikram Seth translated from the Chinese poet Du Fu.

8.

Amir Khan

Raga Marwa

Composer: Traditional improvisation

Book

Tang shi sanbai shou (Three Hundred Tang Poems) by

Others who chose this author

Luxury item

Calligraphy materials

Others who chose a similar luxury