Sarah O'Reilly, project interviewer for Authors' Lives writes:

Extracts from the oral history collection Authors’ Lives have recently been published on a 2-disc CD, ‘The Writing Life: Authors Speak’. One of the most difficult tasks in putting the CD together was to boil down the hundreds of hours of interviews we had in the archive into two 70-minute CDs. And seeing as those interviews covered all aspects of the writer’s life – from what may make someone grow up to be a writer, to their experience of the writing process and the things that inspire them, to the changes they may have witnessed over the last half century to the way in which books are written, published and read – we had a job deciding which aspect of the writer’s life the CD should focus on.

In the end we felt that a CD which could shed some light on the creative process would be of most interest to listeners, and the most straightforward way of handling the heterogenous material within the collection. Because though we may know as readers what it is to live with (or should that be through?) a book, we probably don’t know much about the writer’s experience of the creative process, let alone their values, inspirations and perceptions of their craft. And how much do we understand about the way in which a writer’s life may be put into the service of their work? We hope ‘The Writing Life: Authors’ Speak’ will shed some light on these mysterious areas.

A BL podcast on ‘The Writing Life: Authors Speak’ can be found here.  To hear three interviewees – Philip Hensher, Hilary Spurling and Michael Frayn - discussing their writing lives in a recent event in the Library Conference Centre, click here.  The interviews within the Authors' Lives archive can be browsed on the Sound Archive catalogue by searching with the collection reference number C1276.