From JS Bach to Nina Simone.

Novelist and short story writer Anne Tyler shares her castaway choices with Lauren Laverne

Her 23 novels include the Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons.

Anne was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1941, the oldest of four children. Her parents were Quakers and the family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina in 1948. When she was 11 the family moved to Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, where Anne attended a mainstream school.

Anne majored in Russian literature at Duke University in North Carolina where she enrolled in a creative writing class run by the author Reynolds Price. After completing her studies she worked as a librarian in the university library.

Anne’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964 when she was just 22-years-old. Her writing is widely praised for the way it chronicles the lives of middle-class America and celebrates endurance and the complexities of family relationships.

Anne moved to Baltimore with her husband and children in 1967 and the city has been the setting for her books ever since.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2022. Show less