Desert Island Discs

William Boyd is the author of eighteen novels, five short story collections and numerous screenplays. His first published novel, A Good Man in Africa, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. He is well known for writing ‘whole life’ novels including Any Human Heart which he adapted as a BAFTA-winning television series. He was born in Accra in Ghana where his Scottish father worked as a docto...

Sir Jony Ive is a designer who is best known for his pioneering work at Apple alongside his friend and colleague, the late Steve Jobs. Jony’s creative vision is behind some of the company’s seminal products which have transformed the way we live today including phones, music players and watches. He was born in Chingford in east London and loved drawing and spending time in his father’s workshop wh...

Wilhelmina – Mina – Smallman is an activist who campaigns for the safety of women and girls and police reform. She is a former teacher and priest who was the first woman of colour to be an archdeacon in the Church of England. In 2020 her daughters Bibaa and Nicole were murdered as they celebrated Bibaa’s 46th birthday in Fryent Country Park. It later came to light that two policemen, who were guar...

Actor Stephen Mangan is castaway by Lauren Laverne in an extended edition. Stephen is an award-winning actor who is also a presenter and writer. His prolific career includes comedic roles in TV hits Green Wing; Episodes and Adrian Mole. He also plays the much loved Nathan in BBC drama The Split and has appeared in many award winning theatre productions in the UK and on Broadway. Born in London to...

Nemone Lethbridge is a barrister who was called to the bar in 1956. One of very few female barristers working at the time, she encountered misogyny and was one of the trailblazers for women working in the legal profession who followed behind her. At her first Chambers, she wasn’t allowed to share a toilet with her male colleagues and had to use the facilities in a nearby café. It was hard for her...

Nick Cave is a singer and writer who, with his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, has released emotionally intense and provocative music since the mid-Eighties. He is also a novelist, composer and has written film scripts and soundtracks along with his writing partner and Bad Seed Warren Ellis. Nick grew up in Wangaratta, Australia the third of four children. He formed his first band, the Boys Next...

Harriet Wistrich is one of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers. In 2016 she founded the Centre for Women’s Justice and over the course of her career, she has won landmark victories in very difficult legal cases. She has helped women imprisoned after killing their abusers regain their freedom. She’s also represented women seeking justice from the Metropolitan Police over their deploym...

Laurie Anderson is an artist and performer who came to fame in the UK with her 1981 hit O Superman. Her work spans music, film and multimedia projects which interrogate our relationship with technology and tell stories about the world we live in. She was born in Chicago in 1947, the second-oldest of eight children, and started learning the violin when she was five. She studied Art History at Barna...

Mark-Anthony Turnage is a composer of contemporary classical music. Once called “Britain’s hippest composer”, he has been in a rock band, got drunk with Francis Bacon, and tackled anything from drug abuse to football in his works. Mark was born in June 1960 in the Thames estuary town of Corringham in Essex. His musical talent was nurtured by his parents and he studied composition at the junior dep...

Marianela Núñez is a Principal dancer of the Royal Ballet and Opera. Born in Argentina in 1982, Marianela knew she wanted to be a ballet dancer from the age of five and joined the Teatro Colón Ballet School in Buenos Aires when she was eight. She dedicated herself to becoming a professional ballerina and had the full support of her parents despite having to leave home at fifteen to join the Royal...

Gareth Southgate OBE is the most successful England men’s football manger in the modern game. He holds the record as the man who has represented England in more games than anyone else, with 102 games as men's senior team manager, 57 caps as a player and 37 as men's under-21 head coach, leading to a total of 196 games in which he has been involved as a player or coach. It’s a remarkable career and...

Cher has been a global star for over six decades. Her career has spanned music, television and film and throughout that time her outfits have made flamboyant fashion statements. She was born Cherilyn Sarkisian in El Centro, California and had a peripatetic childhood. Her mother married six times and with each new husband the family moved house. In 1962, when she was 16, Cher met Sonny Bono in a co...

Former cricketer Ebony Rainford-Brent is the first Black woman to play for England and she was part of the team which won the Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2009. Today she is a broadcaster and cricket commentator for Channel 4, Sky Sports and the BBC’s Test Match Special. Ebony was born in south London and as a child it was football that caught her attention, especially Liverpool FC and her hero Ro...

Mark Steel is a writer, comedian and radio presenter. His performing career began as a poet in the alternative comedy scene in the early eighties at the Comedy Store. A regular presenter on Radio 4, he began his award winning series, Mark Steel’s in Town in 2009. Alongside his performing career, he’s been a regular newspaper columnist writing for the Guardian and Independent Newspapers. Mark was b...

Steven Knight CBE is a screenwriter, producer, and director for film and television. He is best known for creating the TV series Peaky Blinders but he has also turned his hand to feature films, novels, comedy and even gameshows. He co-created the global TV quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. His first film, Dirty Pretty Things, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards;...

Mark Knopfler OBE is one of the UK’s most successful rock musicians and composers. He co-founded the band Dire Straits and their album Brothers in Arms is one of the bestselling albums of all time with 30 million copies sold. Alongside the many successes of Dire Straits, Mark has also composed hit songs for other artists like Private Dancer for Tina Turner and many soundtracks including Local Hero...

Sarah Raven is one of Britain’s best known gardeners. Since her debut book, The Cutting Garden in 1996 she has written for national newspapers and magazines and shared her gardening knowledge as a broadcaster. Sarah’s love for gardening started with her family. Her father John was a Classics scholar at Cambridge and a keen amateur botanist and her mother Faith introduced Sarah to the joys of cutti...

The writer David Nicholls is best known for his 2009 novel One Day which has sold 6 million copies, been made into a film and a Netflix series which reached the top 10 in 89 countries. He’s written six novels and his work as a screenwriter has won him a BAFTA and an Emmy nomination. He was born in 1966 and studied Drama and English Literature at Bristol University. This partly inspired his novel S...

Errollyn Wallen is one of the world’s most performed living composers. Her work, which includes 22 operas, orchestral, chamber and vocal works, was played at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in 2012 and at Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees. She was the first black woman to have a piece featured in the BBC Proms and the first woman to receive an Ivor Novello award for Cla...

Rob Delaney is a comedian, writer and actor who is best known for the television series Catastrophe, which he co-wrote and co-starred in alongside Sharon Horgan. He has also appeared in Hollywood blockbusters including Deadpool and Mission Impossible. Rob was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Marblehead on the north shore. He studied for a degree in Musical Theatre at New York Universit...

Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist who specialises in palynology – the study of pollen. Her expertise has led her to work with every police force in Britain and helped solve some of the country’s most notorious crimes including the Soham murder case in which two young girls were killed by school caretaker Ian Huntley. Patricia was born in Cefn Fforest, a mining village in the Sir...

Anthony Joshua MBE is a British heavyweight boxer, Olympic gold medallist and two-time former unified world heavyweight champion. Anthony was born in 1989 and grew up in Watford. When he was 11, he moved with his mother to Nigeria, her home country, and attended a boarding school there for several months. When the family returned to Watford, Anthony took part in football and athletics at school, a...

Clive Myrie is an award-winning journalist and news presenter who is one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents. In 2021 he took over from John Humphrys as Question Master of the quiz show Mastermind and has also presented travel programmes about Italy and the Caribbean. Clive’s parents are from Jamaica and he was born in Farnworth, near Bolton – one of seven children. As a young boy...

Shirine Khoury-Haq is the chief executive officer of the Co-op Group – the first female chief executive in its 180-year history and the first from an ethnic minority background. Shirine was born in Beirut to a Palestinian father and a Turkish mother. Her father was a geophysicist who worked in the oil industry and his work took the family around the world. By the time Shirine was 12 she had lived...

The Australian actor Rebel Wilson became an international star with a breakthrough part in the 2011 Hollywood comedy Bridesmaids, opposite Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. She followed this up playing Fat Amy in the highly successful Pitch Perfect trilogy, which documents the fortunes of a female college acapella group. Rebel was born in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney. Her parents bred and showed d...