I was stupid enough to be busy on the night when BBC Four showed a Review Show Special of Kirsty Wark interviewing Donna Tartt – and now it is gone from iPlayer! But I found a section of it that Newsnight put on YouTube – so here it is…
It is an utter joy to hear the ever reclusive Tartt speak about her work, as well as to hear her read from The Goldfinch. Makes me even more excited for seeing her in Oxford in a couple of weeks!
These Little Words 
Thanks so much for this – I didn’t want to listen to the interview until I’d finished the book so, like you, iplayer caught me out!
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Thanks for this I had missed it entirely
I love that combination she mentions ‘density and speed’ as ever, she has precisely encapsulated that essence of the best writing – the contradictory urge to turn the page ‘what next’ what she calls the ‘greedy gleeful’ childlike reading sense and the ‘WHOAAAAA stop a litle there, savour, sink, absorb, get inside, underneath, delve into THIS precise moment’
Great stuff, thanks,. this further illuminated my sense of her as a writer, and my sense of what it always is I am wanting from a book. I shall be muttering density and speed and greedy gleeful to myself now, when I find another book managing that balance.
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[…] I’m grateful to Lizzi at These Little Words for pointing those of us who missed out towards this short clip – who would have guessed that the notoriously reclusive Donna Tartt writes in the New York […]
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