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.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the writer Julie Birch Hill. Columnist and author, she is a committed

non-conformist daring the world to take issue with her vociferous life and work.

She tends towards the counterintuitive in the same way that Jackson Pollock tended towards

the abstract, and depending on whom you ask is either a Marxist critic or a right-wing columnist.

As a child she used to hide away when potential playmates came to call.

At 17 she was writing for the NME and in the decade since she's plied her trade at the

times the guardian and the daily mail among many others she's also written 20

odd books her autobiography is entitled I knew I was right.

She says a lot of things I've done in my life

have been in an effort to be alone,

whether it's been walking away from my marriages

or abandoning my children,

part of me has always wanted to be alone.

And therefore Julie Birch Hill,

the perfect profession for you is to be the writer,

solitary, non-collaborative.

Yes, and also the perfect person to be on a desert island. Yes you

you're quite happy at the prospect of that idea. I'd love it. I'd miss my husband

down at first but I would get used to it really quickly and I do love my own

...