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availability. Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, a literary editor for The Spectator, and my guest this week is the writer Daniel Tamet,

whose new book is Nine Minds, Inner Lives on the Spectrum,

which is pen portraits of nine lives of people who are in the autism spectrum or Asperger's

syndrome.

Daniel, you're joining us.

Can you start by telling me, how did you choose these nine lives?

Yes.

Well, nine because it's a nice number, it goes well with minds, nine minds.

Not too many and at the same time just enough to show the diversity,

the enormous diversity in fact within the spectrum.

And the people were all individuals who had spoken publicly at some point about their autism.

Obviously that's essential because I needed to be able to have them speak to me rather intimately about their experiences. They're in

the lives as well. Their dreams, the hopes, their fears, the obstacles they've had to overcome

some quite traumatic experiences for some of

them. So I needed them to have spoken publicly, to be confident and comfortable speaking

publicly about their autism. One of the people actually came to me. I wasn't looking out for

her, Amanda, the Australian in the book.

She'd written a thesis, a doctoral thesis, about a wonderful Australian poet, an autistic poet,

as well, Les Murray, who passed away a few years ago. And I knew Les personally and I've translated

...