Francesca Simon
Anyone who\u2019s spent any time with children in the last thirty years will know Horrid Henry and his brother, Perfect Peter. They\u2019re the creations of Francesca Simon, and they\u2019ve appeared in 25 books, been translated into 31 languages and sold 25 million copies. They seem to embody archetypes: the chaotic, naughty brother who\u2019s always in trouble, and the neat well-behaved sibling who\u2019s always anxious to please the parents.
In Private Passions, Francesca Simon tells Michael Berkeley that her own emotional memories of childhood are extraordinarily vivid. She was brought up living on the beach in Malibu, where her father Mayo Simon was a screenwriter, but then moved around to Paris and New York and London. It all sounds glamorous, but actually, she says, it was hard. They moved so often that she always felt like an outsider. Francesca chooses music that reflects the very diverse influences of her early life: Yiddish and Breton folk songs, and Jascha Haifetz playing the Bach Double Violin Concerto. She also chooses music by the young British composer Gavin Higgins, for whom she\u2019s written a libretto for his new work The Faerie Bride, and by E. J. Moeran, a composer she thinks should be much better known.
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3\nProduced by Elizabeth Burke