Rare Interview with Alan Bennett

Today's Guardian book podcast has an interview with Alexandra Harris whose book Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper has just won the Guardian first book award. And there is a rare interview with Alan Bennett which is quite wonderful. His memoir A Life Like Other People's was published earlier this year to great acclaim. He discusses his eighteen year old partnership with Rupert Thomas and how they moved in together after he was diagnosed with cancer. He mentions his working class background and his political affiliations (to the left of the Labour Party). History Boys is perhaps his biggest success. It has a definite trajectory of admission to Oxford or Cambridge and draws people into the characters. He talks about his writing: never underestimate the importance of the will in writing, he says. He writes every day. "You've got to do it or you'll get nowhere."