Hello, I'm Cresti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for

rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this week is a writer. Two years ago he won the Booker Prize for his novel

Amsterdam. It was nearly 30 years ago that he began the journey to such success as the

first student of the Creative Writing course set up by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson

at the University of East Anglia. In a string of acclaimed novels the cement garden, the

child in time and black dogs among them he's demonstrated a wonderful gift for telling

imaginative and elegantly written stories. I love the solitude, the sheer pleasure of writing

he said, the secrecy, the secret excitement. He is Ian McEwan. Writing is a solitary business

Ian, is it still exciting? Does it go on being exciting? Well there are good days and bad days

obviously but yes in fact I have to say that it gets better. I think when I started I used to sweat

for so long over one sentence that I sometimes rather denied myself the pleasure but yes I do

find when things go well, when things are unwinding and you're giving yourself surprises day by day

that it's extraordinary. But surely less secret these days once you win the Booker, you know,

your life is kind of up for grabs isn't it? Well I've got very good at saying no like most writers

quite cany at protecting my solitude. But you are less secret, you read I think a whole chunk

of your work in progress at TAY on Why, the literary festival last year. Yes this is overweening

confidence. I'd have always done that. It's a way of trying something out. But it seemed to me

in the past you've been frightened that if you talked about what you were writing too much you know

it would all disappear fly away. I think I even at Hay on Why when after I'd read that piece I wasn't

going to talk too much ever about what I was intending to do because I still wasn't entirely sure.

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