KM Peyton podcast
May 7th, 2009 by Vanessa
Kathleen Peyton is one of my favourite authors and has been ever since I saw the TV series of Flambards in the late 1970s. I was allowed to stay up late to watch it because it had horses in it and I was the classic pony-mad child. I devoured the books and decided, aged 9, that I wanted to be a writer. I even had a little portable typewriter where I would bash out what were almost certainly truly execrable stories. Fortunately for literature I gave up on that idea when I went to secondary school and discovered that you certainly didn’t admit that you wanted to be a writer and that it wasn’t A Proper Job anyway.
I kept reading Kathy’s books though and now have most of my favourites in first edition hardback form and they’re much treasured. And I still read them: like many of our other authors such as Victoria Walker, Josphine Pullein Thompson and M Pardoe, Kathy’s books are food for the troubled soul. Or the cold-ridden respiratory system, or whatever else makes one want to take to the sofa with a good book and some peace and quiet. And I am immensely proud to number Kathy among our authors and every now and then I get quite fan-girly about it!
I’m sure Kathy won’t mind my letting you know that she’ll be eighty this year, has written over sixty books and her latest, Far From Home, has just been published. Her career has been a remarkable story and continues apace with age not interrupting her writing habit at all.
Last week, the Carnegie Medal-winning author was interviewed by Mark Lawson for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row arts programme and it was wonderful to hear her – her enthusiasm for writing and life fairly crackled across – and we’re very grateful to Radio 4 for allowing us to turn that interview into a podcast which you can listen by going to our Fidracasts page.
I thought the interview was fascinating and I was especilly interested to hear that a pilot of the fourth Flambards book was made but never broadcast. As a fan who has the original series on DVD I’ll have to see if I can get to see that!
Thanks for posting the interview. You know, I still haven’t actually seen Flambards…
Oh, thanks Vanessa! This is the sort of thing we often miss out on Downunder. Of course when you open that bookshop here we will get all of this sort of thing on a regular basis!
Oh, cool – I shall be listening to the podcast as soon as I get home. I’m afraid I had to be ruthless and rehome most of my pony books a couple of years ago. Waved sadly goodbye to all those Pullein-Thompsons… but I kept Fly-by-Night, The Team and the Pennington books!
Hi from Bev in New Zealand,
I am so glad you wrote about KM Peyton because it led me to her website which is just brilliant. However it is likely to be expensive – I thought I had nearly all her books and now know I have just on half! Also my most recent is Blind Beauty (1999) and I had no idea she was still writing.So thank you again.