Hay-on-Sky 2009 - Episode 10
In the last episode of this year’s Hay-on-Sky, Mariella Frostrup talks to authors Zoe Heller and Antonia Fraser and politician Vince Cable also drops by for a chat.
Giles Coren meets up with linguist David Crystal to talk books and the ridiculously talented Mara Carlyle performs in the studio.
Each day our guests also reveal their favourite summer reads. Zoe’s summer favourites are The Ambassadors by Henry James and The Spare Room by Helen Garner.
Antonia’s summer readings include The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor.
Vince Cable’s summer favourites are Fool’s Gold by Gillian Tett and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
If you’d like to read an extract of any of our guests’ books, you can take advantage of our literary test drive service with Lovereading
More on our guests
Zoë Heller
Journalist and novelist Zoë Heller was born in London and educated at Oxford and Columbia Universities. After embarking on a career in journalism, she wrote book reviews for various newspapers before becoming a feature writer for The Independent, a role which led to a weekly ‘confessional’ column in The Sunday Times chronicling her life as a single girl about town long before Bridget Jones was a twinkle in Helen Fielding’s imagination. She now lives in New York City, writes for the Daily Telegraph (she won the title ‘Columnist of the Year’ in 2002), and contributes to The New Yorker and other magazines.
She is the author of two novels: Everything You Know, a dark comedy about misanthropic writer Willy Miller, and Notes on a Scandal, which tells the story of an affair between a high school teacher and her student through the eyes of the teacher’s supposed friend, Barbara Covett. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for fiction, and was recently released as a feature film starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. Her most recent novel is The Believers, an ambitious tale of the dysfunctional life of a New York Jewish family, which was recently released to much praise. Join her on the sofa with Mariella as she chats about writing the new book, and what she’s up to in Hay.
…And if you want to know more, The Believers bills itself as follows: “A comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family’s struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt. When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel’s children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the meantime, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what – if anything – they still believe in.”
Antonia Fraser
Lady Antonia Fraser has been in the public eye since the publication of her first book in 1969: this year marks the 40th anniversary of her seminal biography of Mary Queen of Scots, written back in the day when it was unfashionable to write about history and unheard of for a non-academic to do so.
The details of her life are well known: born in London in 1932, the first of eight children of Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, and Elizabeth Harman, who as Elizabeth Longford went on to write several acclaimed historical biographies herself, she read history at Oxford and after a series of odd jobs – accounts typist, Fenwick’s hat department –married at 24 and began writing between her fifth and sixth children.
Since 1969 she has written nine acclaimed historical works which have been international best-sellers, beginning with the aforementioned Mary Queen of Scots. She has also written eight crime novels and two books of short stories featuring her investigator Jemima Shore.
Among the many awards she has received are the Wolfson Award for History; the James Tait Black Prize for Biography; the Crimewriters’ Non-Fiction Gold Dagger; the Franco-British Society Literary Award, and the Norton Medlicott Medallion of the Historical Association. She was made a CBE in 1999. She has six children by her first marriage to Sir Hugh Fraser MP and eighteen grandchildren. She was married to Harold Pinter who died on Christmas Eve 2008.
Mara Carlyle
For the final Hay-on-Sky entertainment spot, we’re bringing you someone new, cutting-edge and very, very good. Mara Carlyle is a London-based singer-songwriter who plays both the guitar and the saw, whose first album, The Lovely, was made on a second-hand Apple laptop in the front room of her flat in Kilburn, north London, in between working shifts at a homeless shelter.
Carlyle has been making music all her life: the child of musician parents, she formed a punk band with her brothers while still at primary school and has been involved with ensembles participating in genres as diverse as church music, jazz, bluegrass, opera and electronic. As her homemade album began to grow, she was signed to Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records at the beginning of 2004 and put the finishing touches to The Lovely. Her debut single, I Blame Dido EP (which she insists refers to Purcell’s Dido, as opposed to the other, singing one…),was equally highly acclaimed, and Carlyle has gone on to contribute vocals and saw to several tracks on Guillemots 2006 Mercury Music Prize-nominated album Through the Windowpane. An EP of new material, Ancient and Modern, was released in 2008 and her second album, Nuzzle, is still awaiting release.
Her voice is operatic and her music is ethereal, classical and electro- poppy which defies all description (so we’ll stop trying) – tune in to hear something fresh that might just be your favourite album of the year…
