:00:00. > :00:00.the website this afternoon. We will have plenty more for you, a full
:00:00. > :00:10.round-up, in Sports day at 6:30pm. Now it is time for Meet The Author.
:00:11. > :00:13.Marina Lewycka became a literary star at the age of 58
:00:14. > :00:15.with her first novel, a Short History of
:00:16. > :00:18.It was a critical and commercial success, winning prizes
:00:19. > :00:23.She's the daughter of two Ukrainians, who had been taken
:00:24. > :00:25.to Germany as forced labourers by the Nazis.
:00:26. > :00:27.She was born in a refugee camp before her family
:00:28. > :00:31.Marina Lewycka's new novel, which is her fifth, is set
:00:32. > :00:54.on a housing estate in North London, and it's called The Lubetkin Legacy.
:00:55. > :00:56.Marina, let's start with the title of the book, The Lubetkin Legacy.
:00:57. > :00:59.Now, Berthold Lubetkin was a real person.
:01:00. > :01:07.Well, he inspired me in the sense that I spent a lot of time
:01:08. > :01:10.walking around in London, and you could see all the cranes
:01:11. > :01:12.and the building works, and the whole of London seems
:01:13. > :01:15.as though it's being rebuilt, but if you look behind that
:01:16. > :01:18.and beyond that, you see the traces, the legacy of a different
:01:19. > :01:23.You see a lot of social housing, and a lot of the best social
:01:24. > :01:26.housing in London was built by Berthold Lubetkin, and also very
:01:27. > :01:29.close to where I sit, the very beautiful Finsbury Health Centre,
:01:30. > :01:33.I started to think about, what's happened here?
:01:34. > :01:37.And then a story popped into my head.
:01:38. > :01:41.The book is set on a fictional housing estate in North
:01:42. > :01:46.And the story alternates between a middle-aged man called
:01:47. > :01:49.Berthold, who is a failed actor and lives with his mother
:01:50. > :01:51.and a beautiful young woman called Violet, who is
:01:52. > :01:57.Why did you decide to structure the novel in that way?
:01:58. > :02:04.Well, because - in a way because people's lives are so often
:02:05. > :02:08.in parallel and close to people and very seldom and just
:02:09. > :02:11.occasionally intersect, as these two do, sometimes
:02:12. > :02:14.intersect, and I suppose it's partly the great variety of people that
:02:15. > :02:18.lives in London and especially on council estates nowadays and how
:02:19. > :02:24.They have their own destinies and life paths, and they're looking
:02:25. > :02:28.for completely different things, but there's just a point
:02:29. > :02:36.Well, we won't give anything else away, but part of the theme,
:02:37. > :02:39.I suppose, of the book is the pitfalls of life in modern
:02:40. > :02:42.Britain, and boy, are there some pitfalls,
:02:43. > :02:51.You've already touched on social housing.
:02:52. > :02:53.You also write about the so-called bedroom tax, disability allowance,
:02:54. > :02:54.corruption in Kenya, offshore wealth management.
:02:55. > :02:56.You seem quite angry with the world today.
:02:57. > :03:02.Well, I am angry, but I hope it doesn't come across as a very angry
:03:03. > :03:05.book because really when I look around the world,
:03:06. > :03:11.Then I think the only way people are going to survive this is I can
:03:12. > :03:14.cheer them up a bit, so I take something which is really
:03:15. > :03:16.very dreadful, like the bedroom tax, and I hope I can
:03:17. > :03:22.It's not an angry book, and people who have read your previous books
:03:23. > :03:25.will recognise what you do, which is to write about sometimes
:03:26. > :03:27.quite desperate circumstances but in a very comic way.
:03:28. > :03:29.I suspect that's quite a difficult trick to pull
:03:30. > :03:40.If you're used to thinking about things in a comic way,
:03:41. > :03:42.you look at a situation and you think, well,
:03:43. > :03:45.And invariably there is one, surprisingly sometimes.
:03:46. > :03:48.I've read that you thought at one point you'd never get
:03:49. > :03:55.Partly because it has these two separate trajectories,
:03:56. > :03:59.and at the end, you do have to pull everything together.
:04:00. > :04:03.You have to bring things to a conclusion, and in a way,
:04:04. > :04:06.because the issues and the stories are ongoing and in real
:04:07. > :04:08.life are not resolved, nevertheless you need to bring them
:04:09. > :04:15.You have to resolve them for the characters if not
:04:16. > :04:20.I'm also interested - why did you set it in London?
:04:21. > :04:22.Because you don't live in London, do you?
:04:23. > :04:27.Yes, but I spent a lot of time in London, and I think in a way
:04:28. > :04:30.all of the same things are happening in all of our cities.
:04:31. > :04:33.You can see the public spaces are being stripped off and sold off
:04:34. > :04:35.and things which were once in the public domain
:04:36. > :04:37.are being privatised, and new housing is going up that
:04:38. > :04:40.people can't afford, and it's happening everywhere,
:04:41. > :04:43.but it's happening particularly in London.
:04:44. > :04:45.It's as though London's foreshadowing what's happening
:04:46. > :04:49.Now, your first novel, A Short History of Tractors
:04:50. > :04:52.in Ukrainian was rejected 36 times - Yes.
:04:53. > :04:55.- before you finally found a publisher, as I said,
:04:56. > :05:01.You know, I love writing, and I think
:05:02. > :05:06.I just - you - sometimes in real life, you don't have a lot
:05:07. > :05:10.of control over what's going on in your life,
:05:11. > :05:14.When you're writing, you're in control.
:05:15. > :05:19.The characters do what you want them to do, within limits.
:05:20. > :05:22.You can't actually force characters to do things that are out
:05:23. > :05:24.of character, but somehow you're in charge, and it's really
:05:25. > :05:29.Had dreadful things happened to you, then?
:05:30. > :05:33.Well, not as dreadful as all that, but sort of work and -
:05:34. > :05:40.I didn't have a fantastic career outside of writing, and you know,
:05:41. > :05:44.just things like parking tickets or annoyances or whatever, but in -
:05:45. > :05:47.when you write about those things, you can turn them into a comedy.
:05:48. > :05:54.You can make them tolerable for you,
:05:55. > :05:59.When you achieve such phenomenal success with your first novel,
:06:00. > :06:02.is that only a blessing, or are there any drawbacks
:06:03. > :06:09.Well, there are drawbacks, because people have expectations,
:06:10. > :06:15.and people often say to you, "I love your book."
:06:16. > :06:17.But it's nice now that sometimes people say,
:06:18. > :06:22.And so - whereas a lot of people who only read The Tractors hadn't
:06:23. > :06:25.come back to read my previous books, I always hope that they will.
:06:26. > :06:27.The truth is without Tractors, nobody would have heard
:06:28. > :06:31.I suppose there's - when you're writing your
:06:32. > :06:33.first novel, there's no pressure, is there?
:06:34. > :06:36.You're under no contractual obligation.
:06:37. > :06:40.I don't know whether you can ever do that again.
:06:41. > :06:42.That's right, because afterwards, there are always expectations,
:06:43. > :06:46.and there's always the idea that, you know, as my lovely
:06:47. > :06:49.publisher said, "We want you to be exactly the same
:06:50. > :06:57.One thing that did strike me about this novel is there are far
:06:58. > :07:00.fewer Ukrainian characters in it than in your previous books.
:07:01. > :07:04.Well, there's one high-profile Ukrainian character in it,
:07:05. > :07:08.but I - so many awful things have happened in the Ukraine that
:07:09. > :07:13.That is something that makes me quite angry,
:07:14. > :07:16.and I feel I have to distance myself from it, really.
:07:17. > :07:19.I don't think I could - I think it's something I couldn't
:07:20. > :07:22.write about with a light touch as much maybe as I would
:07:23. > :07:28.like to treat other topics, so I have backed off a little bit.
:07:29. > :07:32.Because you wrote A Brief History of Tractors in 2005.
:07:33. > :07:35.As you say, an enormous amount has happened in the Ukraine
:07:36. > :07:40.Are the events there ever anything you think you could address directly
:07:41. > :07:45.Well, it wouldn't be a funny novel, and it wouldn't be the events that -
:07:46. > :07:48.I would like to write more about Ukraine because Ukraine
:07:49. > :07:51.is a country that lends itself to fiction, and if I dare say so,
:07:52. > :07:56.But the present state of the country is not one that you could write
:07:57. > :08:02.Talking to you, I'm beginning to sense that you'd quite
:08:03. > :08:08.Well, I think - what I try and do is write funny books
:08:09. > :08:14.I think I'd be useless writing a book that was really serious.
:08:15. > :08:18.Marina Lewycka, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us