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A Touch of Frostrup

15.05.08 Anna Richardson

Mariella Frostrup is looking forward to next week’s Guardian Hay Festival. Last year was her first visit to Hay thanks to Sky Arts’ media partnership, and by all accounts she had a baptism of fire.
With responsibility for presenting programmes for both Sky Arts and BBC Radio 4, as well as hosting stage events, Frostrup says her memories of last year’s Hay are “quite vague”. There were “some great” and “some strange” guests, “but other than that, [I remember] phenomenal weather in terms of the downpour—and very muddy fields”.

This time should be different, she hopes. “I think it does take at least one year’s visit to work out how best to go about it. I’ve got the hang of it now.” She is relishing encountering again the particular Hay brand of audience: “They are incredibly erudite, have clearly read some of the books, and there’s a real democracy about Hay in that everyone is wandering the fields together.”

Among those wandering the fields this year are Salman Rushdie (one of Frostrup’s favourite interviewees of the past), Marian Keyes, former US president Jimmy Carter, Martin Amis and Jools Holland. One of Frostrup’s interviewees at Hay will be Cherie Blair, a prospect she finds intriguing. “She’s an exceptional woman and has strong opinions, and that’s always good in an interview. People get misrepresented by soundbites, and before you judge anyone, you have to have the opportunity to see them in full flow.”

Frostrup is good at full flow and at eliciting more than just soundbites from authors. She’s been at it for more than 15 years, developing her buoyant style in that unforgettably smoky voice. She currently presents the weekly “Open Book” show on Radio 4, and signed up for Sky Arts’ “The Book Show” after the channel relaunched last year.

She has also judged and presented scores of literary prizes, including the Man Booker and the Whitbread (now the Costa Book of the Year), and has effortlessly taken on the mantle of a champion of books.

Becoming the book trade’s media darling was not premeditated, however. “I didn’t always think I would get into books [professionally]. I’m a reader; it’s something I enjoy immensely. I guess Radio 4 and Sky felt they wanted someone with a healthy enthusiasm for the subject—I was offered a job that was too tantalising to turn down, twice in a row.”

Bonkers with books

Frostrup gets through around 70 to 80 books a year, but “it’s not the only thing I do”, she hastens to add. “I’d go completely bonkers if all I ever did was sit around reading. But I’m lucky because I do get to do other things, and that’s what keeps me enthusiastic on the literary front.”

She is particularly talkative about her judging job on the Best of the Booker award this year, set up to cele­brate 40 years of the prize. “It is one of the best judging jobs you could ever be given, [because] you’re dealing with the absolute crème de la crème of novels. The most interesting thing was going back to the [earlier] books and finding some real gems.”

Eventually her panel settled on Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995); Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988); J M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999); Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974); J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973); and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). “I’m sure there’ll be debate,” she says, “but I defy anyone to suggest that any one of them shouldn’t be on the shortlist.”

Into the past

The main aim of the stunt is to encourage people to revisit books, she adds. “If you think of the number of amazing books that have been published in the last five years—let alone the last 50—it’s such a shame that they’re left at the back of the store gathering dust. I hope that the public ends up having the same delicious time that we did, immersing themselves in books that they otherwise might not have read.”

Delving into the past and discovering backlist books is a rare pleasure for Frostrup. “When I go on holiday, I try to take [books] that have nothing to do with anything I’m supposed to be reading, but that’s not really possible,” she says. “I read The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett last year, and it was the first book I read in a year purely for pleasure—I loved it.”

She also regrets “not being able to dawdle around a bookshop”. “One of the loveliest things about books is the process of finding one that you love—I sometimes yearn for that.”

Like any true books champion, she dismisses grumbles about the “dumbing down” of British publishing: “There are great novels published every day and a lot of them don’t get mentioned or reviewed, and that’s a terrible tragedy. But to say that novels are dumbing down is nonsense—lots of people are buying lots of dumb novels, but that doesn’t mean that novels are dumbing down.”
What is close to her heart, however, is the state of literacy: “Everyone involved in publishing should get involved in the battle to tackle literacy in this country. I think more about whether kids are being taught to read than about what publishing figures are.”

As for the obvious question—namely the UK’s perceived lack of decent media book programming—Frostrup keeps it simple: “I don’t think about it at all—except insofar as I present the two main book programmes, and I think: ‘Thank goodness that they exist.’ ”

Thank goodness indeed.

Todays Picks Media Anna Richardson Profile Prize Best of the Booker Radio 4 Sky Arts Open Book

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