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

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Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the writer David Armand. Most of his work is for children, but the adults who populate the juries of heavyweight literary prizes really like it too.

The accolades began with his first novel, Scallig, published in 1998 when he was 47.

It won the Weighty Whitbread Children's Award and then many others besides.

Ever since he's been acclaimed for his ability to craft complex philosophical his and whether that means there is a sort of catharsis when you write.

I think there is some kind of catharsis. I think if you're driven to write it's because there's something

inside you that's driven to be written that wants to get out and to be written.

So I know I'm writing well when I feel I'm

writing from some kind of need that is an urgency to get something out. It's almost

like I'm not inventing something, but that something is kind of weirdly inventing me or inventing itself on the

paper in front of me. And what about the age I mentioned just there you were

47 when this first big book Skellig was published to great. You had been writing at that point for

two decades. Did it come as something of a relief?

Yeah, I'd been writing forever and when Skelly came out I waited for the reviews

that said here's this new writer and then the review that said overnight success and I said yeah and it's only taking 20 years.

So it did come as a kind of relief but also there's part of me that didn't care and I think that's important

it's got to be a part of it really doesn't give a damn. There's another part that

thinks I'm the best thing that's ever happened and wait for a claim but the

central thing just does the work. The fact that each of your books had to be written then do you

think if you'd never been published and never met with the considerable

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