Deborah Levy
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Deborah Levy was born in South Africa; when she was five, her father was arrested as a member of the ANC and spent four years in jail. The family left for England, arriving when Deborah was nine, in 1968. Unsurprisingly her work as a writer is concerned with themes of identity, exile, dislocation. Beginning as a poet and a playwright \\u2013 her plays were staged by the RSC \\u2013 she then turned to novels, and there are now seven in all, of which the last three have been nominated for the Booker Prize. The latest is \\u2018The Man Who Saw Everything\\u2019.
Deborah talks with Michael Berkeley about the music that means most to her. Many of the pieces she loves are to do with saying farewell: Lotte Lenya saying \\u2018goodbye\\u2019 in Brecht and Weill\\u2019s Alabama Song; Orpheus pining for Euridice in Kathleen Ferrier\\u2019s legendary recording of Gluck\\u2019s \\u2018Che Faro?\\u2019; sisters wishing their lovers safe travel as, purportedly, they depart for war, in the trio from Mozart\\u2019s Cosi Fan Tutte.
Deborah talks openly about her memories of her father\\u2019s imprisonment and of his return home; about the enormous transition in her life when, aged fifty, her marriage ended; and about how she found a room of her own in which to write, renting a friend\\u2019s garden shed and working to the noise of apples dropping onto the roof. Also among her music is Beethoven\\u2019s Pathetique Sonata (\\u2018the silences are as important as the notes\\u2019); a song by Leonard Cohen; and a translucent setting of a Verlaine poem, \\u2018La Lune Blanche\\u2019, composed by Billy Cowie and sung by identical twins.
Produced by Elizabeth Burke\\nA Loftus production for BBC Radio 3
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