Hello I'm Krestey 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 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer, an only child absorbed into an adult world she published her first novel when she was

19. The critics thought it surprisingly mature, but after an unsuccessful second novel, its author

fell more or less silent for five years.

But then the books came thick and fast.

Between 68 and 74, she produced many of her best-known works, including I'm the King of

the Castle, Strange Meeting, and The Bird of Night, collecting three prestigious

awards as she did so and becoming one of the country's best-known novelists.

More recently, she published Mrs. De Winter, an acclaimed sequel to Daphne Dumou-Mariès Rebecca.

Many of her books contain echoes of her childhood.

Lowniness and isolation are two of her strongest themes.

I've always been incredibly secretive as a writer she says. If it's

seen by anyone else it's gone and I'm not interested. She is Susan Hill. Why is

your writing such a secret process Susan? I mean you know you've got to go public in the end.

Why don't you share it along the way?

I don't know. Some writers do. I prefer the word private to secret secret implies something guilty I just cannot bear

anyone to know anything at all about what's going on between me and the paper while it it's happening, it kills it.

But you have to have great self-confidence to do that, don't you?

I mean, other people would want to be reassured along the way

by somebody whose judgment they trusted.

You know, you were writing something interesting worth reading yes they do I

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