September 27, 2025 • 16 mins
Ken Follett's made a name for himself as an author of historical epic novels - and he's got a new one out.
After starting his career as a thriller writer in the 70s, Ken’s decision to write The Pillars of the Earth in 1989 set his career on a different trajectory, and it paid off.
Pillars has sold over 27 million copies and to date remains his most famous novel - and his total book sales now sits around 198 million copies globally.
Ken’s latest book, Circle of Days, is another historical epic built around the mysteries of Stonehenge.
"They didn't leave anything written, they didn't do many cave paintings and so all we've really got is what the archaeologists dig up out of the ground. My policy is - I find out what's known, what the historians feel confident about. And what isn't known, I'm entitled to make up."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talksedb.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Ken follows is the master of the historical epic novel.
After starting his career as a thriller writer in the seventies,
Ken's decision to write The Pillars of the Earth in
nineteen eighty nine set his career on a different trajectory,
and boy was it a successful one. Pillars itself has
sold over twenty seven million copies and to date remains
his most famous novel. His total book sales now sit
(00:35):
around one hundred and ninety eight million copies globally. Not
bad right. Ken's latest epic undertaking is based on one
of the great mysteries of our age, the building of Stonehenge.
The book is called Circle of Days. Ken Follett, good morning.
Thank you so much for being with us.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Can we start with research, because research is critical to
the success of your books. How much research goes into
one of your books?
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Well, I normally spend about a year preparing to write
the book, between six months and a year, and that
would be a combination of figuring out the plot and
doing the research, so they happened together. What happens is
that I think of something that could happen in the story,
(01:28):
and then I think, well, could that really happen or not?
I need to I need to find out whether this
is possible. And also so then I read a book
about it or something, or search the internet, and that
gives me ideas for other dramatic scenes in the story.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
So the two things work together.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
You've written books which of course been set in the
tenth and eleventh centuries, twelfth, fourteenth, sixteen, twentieth century. A
certain amount of reference material is available your new book,
your latest book, Circle of Days. The story begins around
the year twenty five hundred BC. I'm presuming there isn't
as much reference material available or were you surprised at
(02:10):
what you could discover.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
No, no, you're absolutely right about that.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
There's very little is known about the Stone Age, and
that's partly, of course, because they left no records. They
didn't have writing and reading had not been invented in
Western Europe at the time, although it existed in it
was beginning to be invented in the Middle East.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
But so they didn't leave anything written.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
They didn't do many cave paintings, and so all we've
really got is what the archaeologists dig up.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Out of the ground.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
And so, but my policy is is I find out
what's known by you know, what the historians feel confident about,
and then what isn't known. I think I'm entitled to
make up something plausible. It has to be plausible, it
has to relate to the known facts. But I'm allowed
to imagine how things might have been.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Is this what a track did you? What attracted you
to this particular era and the story of Stone Hinge?
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Well, I saw a book, In fact, I saw the
title of a book, and the book was called How
to Build Stonehenge.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
And I, just before I even.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Bought the book, I just thought, that sounds like a
ken Follick story, how to Build Stonehenge? And and I
read the book and I began to think about it.
It's a story in which ordinary human beings do something extraordinary.
And that's really the kind of story that I like,
where where we rise above our circumstances and h and
(03:48):
you know, it became more and more interesting as I
went on.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
What you were so good at is sitting creating these
these these worlds, taking us into this world, but you
also make the characters relevant to us. What is the
secret to taking historical figures but making them relevant to
the modern day. I'm presuming that's something you intend to do.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Well, absolutely, And I think the secret is that there
are certain things.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
That worry human beings that go very.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Deep and are probably the same at any period of history.
For example, we worry about love and marriage and sex
and the children. I think everybody does that in every age.
We worry about violence, crime and war. And if the
story is in these areas, then whatever period you're in,
(04:48):
these things will be on people's minds.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
I'm fascinated by how you take such an enormous period
of history and turn it into one novel. I mean,
these are quite complex stories. What's the art to that?
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Well, the story really has to come out of the research.
Is that you can't take a modern love story and
plant it in Tudor times, for example, or in the
Middle Ages. That the way it has to work is
the story idea has to come out of the circumstances
of that historical period. And then of course the characters
(05:28):
that you invent can have all the concerns and all
the hopes and fears of every historical period, but they're
linked directly linked to something specific to the Middle Ages
or the sixteenth century or the Victorian era.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
We were just talking therefore. We were talking before about,
you know, making these characters so relevant. I imagining that
you would look back through history and see a lot
of parallels with modern times.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Well, I think so, although you know what I look
for in every period of history, there are people who rebel.
They say I'm not going to be the person that
I'm told to be. You know, the women all through
history who have said I don't want to be married
(06:23):
and have children. I want to be a scientist, or
I want to be a painter or something like that.
And of course they're the most interesting people who write about.
So although occasionally I'm accused of making the story modern,
the truth of the matter is that not everybody is
(06:44):
typical of the era that they live in, and the
people who go against the tide are the most interesting people.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
What did you learn about stone Hinge that fascinating you.
Maybe you didn't know.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
Well, something that I really didn't know about was the
importance of flint. It's the Stone Age, so they have
no metal tools, so they have no knives.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
The only cutting tool they.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Have is a flint, and they used this, you know,
whatever they did chop down trees. For example, they had
a little a little hand axe and you can't, I can't.
We can't show this on the radio, can be. But
I can show it to you now. So it's it's
smaller than my hand, and I've got little hands, and
(07:32):
that's the kind of thing they would use to chop
down an oak tree. So it must have taken them
a long time, but it was all they had. And
the other thing about it is that the best flint
is found quite deep underground, so they mined it. Now,
we don't think of the Stone Age as being sophisticated
enough to have mines, but in this country, in England,
(07:54):
there are the remains of many flint mines. And I
was able to go down one quite deep. I had
to wear you know, the apparright a that connected me
to the surface in case I stumbled on the ladder,
so that I wouldn't fall to my death.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
And then when I got to.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
The base of the shaft, I saw that there were
tunnels going radially out from the base of the shaft
in all directions, in other words, just like a modern
day coal mine, which I've also been down coal mines
for research, but I had to crawl on my hands
and knees.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
This was one of the.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Most difficult bits of research that I did, crawling around,
cowering about twenty meters underground on my hands and knees.
I had knee patches and elbow patches and gloves and
a helmet investigating try and imagine what it was like
for the Stone Age people who were looking for these
but very valuable flints. And then the importance of that is,
(08:57):
of course they were miners. You can't eat flints. They
had to trade the flints for what they needed, food
and clothing and so on. And that proves to us
that there was trading in the Stone Age, which you know,
we might not have been sure of otherwise. And so
that was the only industry they had, really mining flints
(09:22):
and sharpening them.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
That's called napping.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
You have to hit the flint with a stone in
such a way that a flake comes off and leaves
a sharp edge.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Quite a skill.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
And so that whole industry exists. That I had no
idea that that whole industry existed.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Fascinating the places I'm sure you've been to some very
very interesting places with all the historical novels that you
have written and the research that you've done. Can you
start it out as a journalist, then you became a
thriller writer before turning to these big epic historical novels.
And of course I think everybody has read Pillars of
the Earth. What made you turn to historical fiction.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Well, it was the cathedrals themselves what I was writing
through as I wrote thrillers, because I like thrillers.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I still do like thrillers.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
In fact, I was so deep into one that I
was I was a bit late for this talk with
you this evening.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
I had to be phoned.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
You were told, no, you were on time, No complaints,
good anyway, So I was, I was just interested in
the cathedrals, and I was, I.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Mean, they're very beautiful, that they've been there.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
For hundreds and hundreds of years, but I was interested
in the people who built them and.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
How they built them.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
And you'll obviously this curiosity of mine obviously applies in
a similar way to Stonehenge, although the circumstances are completely
different and the story is completely different. But I I
I thought that there was a great popular novel to
be written about building a cathedral, and a lot of
(11:03):
people didn't agree with me, and some of my publishers
were very nervous about it. I think they thought I
was going to, well, I might write a difficult book,
you know, a book that's really only for intellectuals, or
something like that. And really I was convinced that there
could be a great popular novel about this. One of
(11:25):
my publishers actually took my wife Barbara aside and said,
you've got to stop Ken writing this book.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
It's going to ruin his career.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
And so it was perhaps the only time in my
life when I've been writing, everybody else has been wrong anyway,
that doesn't happen to me anywhere near as often as
i'd like. So anyway, so I was convinced that that
would be it would be a terrific book, and I
went ahead with it. And then of course I really
(11:52):
had to make sure that it was you know, readable
and enjoyable and paid a page turner, because if I
if I'd eased up on that that impulse, then the
publishers would have been proved right anyway, So it's as
you obviously know, it turned out very well, and a
lot of people have really enjoyed that book.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I'm very glad I wrote it.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
It's a bit of an odd question, but we we
live in quite interesting times. Do you ever wish that
you could go into the future and write about what's
happening today? Is historical not is historical fiction?
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (12:26):
That would be interesting, wouldn't it, Because of course in
the future you'd know how all the crises that we're
living through that we know, you know how they ended.
I'm often asked if I'd like to go into the past,
and I would like to talk to Shakespeare. I think
if if if I had a time machine, that would
(12:47):
be my first trip, because I'd like to ask him
about the good things and the and the bad things
in his book. I'd like to I'd like to know
read I mean, his most famous speech, to be or
not to be? That is the question whether it's nobler
in the mind uh to suffer the string spring strings
(13:11):
and arrows of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or
to take arms against the sea of troubles? And wait
a minute, will you can't take arms against a sea?
That's a crap line? Will did you were you in
a hurry or or is there some deep meaning there
that I haven't noticed.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
I'd love to ask him that.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think he's probably very grateful. We haven't devised a
time machine just yet. One other thing I wanted to
quickly ask you about, Ken is that you've been involved
in a lot of charities over the years, and you
were president of the Dyslexia Action for ten years, as
well as many others. What drove you to get involved
in an organization.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
Like that, Well, you know, given the life I've lived,
it seems to me such a tragedy when people can't read,
or can't read without difficulty.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
It's given me such joy. You know, I was obviously
not dyslexic.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
I could read when I was four years old, and
I've loved reading ever since, starting with you know, Noddy
goes to toy Town and all the way through James Bond, and.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
It's given me such joy.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
And I feel it's such a shame if people can't read,
and if there's a way to help them, we should
and I did.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
I was some of the I'm not.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Just some of the people in my family are dyslexic,
and I'm dyslexic and I've seen them struggle with it.
And there was a time when schools just didn't even
believe in dyslexia. And you still come across schools where
they say there's no such thing as dyslexia. But I
think it's great if those people get special help. I
also organized the National Year of Reading in ninety eight
(14:53):
to ninety nine, and the object of that campaign was
to was to persuade people to read for pleasure, because
that's the way you divel your literacy ability is when
you're just doing it for fun, doing it because you
enjoy it, and so and the more the more that
(15:15):
a young person reads for pleasure, the better literacy skills
that person will have all through their life. So so
it's always seemed to me these were very worthwhile. I
know there are one hundred, maybe probably a thousand charities
that are worth supporting, but that was the one that
seemed closest to my heart.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Do you ever stop end reflect on your career? Thirty
eight box, one hundred and ninety eight million copies sold.
I mean, it's pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Well, when I do, I can hardly believe it. I mean,
it's really two hundred million books I mean, how did
that happen? I mean, I was you know, I was
always ambitious. I wanted a lot of people to read
my books. But that just you can't imagine two hundred
million books, can you. I mean, I don't know how
(16:03):
many times they go around the world, end on end.
So I'm sort of I'm sort of gobsmacked when I
think about it. I don't think about it very much,
but when I do think about it and somebody says, how.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Many books have you sold in total?
Speaker 4 (16:17):
And I say, it's one hundred and ninety eight million
at the moment and still rising, and then I think, Wow,
that's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
That's a lot of joy of reading, isn't it a
lot of joy?
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yes? Yes, I hope so, Kin follow, thank.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
You so much for your time. It's been a delight
to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
I enjoyed it very much. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And Kin's new book, Circle of Days, is in stores now.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talksedb.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Ken follows is the master of the historical epic novel.
After starting his career as a thriller writer in the seventies,
Ken's decision to write The Pillars of the Earth in
nineteen eighty nine set his career on a different trajectory,
and boy was it a successful one. Pillars itself has
sold over twenty seven million copies and to date remains
his most famous novel. His total book sales now sit
(00:35):
around one hundred and ninety eight million copies globally. Not
bad right. Ken's latest epic undertaking is based on one
of the great mysteries of our age, the building of Stonehenge.
The book is called Circle of Days. Ken Follett, good morning.
Thank you so much for being with us.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Can we start with research, because research is critical to
the success of your books. How much research goes into
one of your books?
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Well, I normally spend about a year preparing to write
the book, between six months and a year, and that
would be a combination of figuring out the plot and
doing the research, so they happened together. What happens is
that I think of something that could happen in the story,
(01:28):
and then I think, well, could that really happen or not?
I need to I need to find out whether this
is possible. And also so then I read a book
about it or something, or search the internet, and that
gives me ideas for other dramatic scenes in the story.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
So the two things work together.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
You've written books which of course been set in the
tenth and eleventh centuries, twelfth, fourteenth, sixteen, twentieth century. A
certain amount of reference material is available your new book,
your latest book, Circle of Days. The story begins around
the year twenty five hundred BC. I'm presuming there isn't
as much reference material available or were you surprised at
(02:10):
what you could discover.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
No, no, you're absolutely right about that.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
There's very little is known about the Stone Age, and
that's partly, of course, because they left no records. They
didn't have writing and reading had not been invented in
Western Europe at the time, although it existed in it
was beginning to be invented in the Middle East.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
But so they didn't leave anything written.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
They didn't do many cave paintings, and so all we've
really got is what the archaeologists dig up.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Out of the ground.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
And so, but my policy is is I find out
what's known by you know, what the historians feel confident about,
and then what isn't known. I think I'm entitled to
make up something plausible. It has to be plausible, it
has to relate to the known facts. But I'm allowed
to imagine how things might have been.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Is this what a track did you? What attracted you
to this particular era and the story of Stone Hinge?
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Well, I saw a book, In fact, I saw the
title of a book, and the book was called How
to Build Stonehenge.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
And I, just before I even.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Bought the book, I just thought, that sounds like a
ken Follick story, how to Build Stonehenge? And and I
read the book and I began to think about it.
It's a story in which ordinary human beings do something extraordinary.
And that's really the kind of story that I like,
where where we rise above our circumstances and h and
(03:48):
you know, it became more and more interesting as I
went on.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
What you were so good at is sitting creating these
these these worlds, taking us into this world, but you
also make the characters relevant to us. What is the
secret to taking historical figures but making them relevant to
the modern day. I'm presuming that's something you intend to do.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Well, absolutely, And I think the secret is that there
are certain things.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
That worry human beings that go very.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Deep and are probably the same at any period of history.
For example, we worry about love and marriage and sex
and the children. I think everybody does that in every age.
We worry about violence, crime and war. And if the
story is in these areas, then whatever period you're in,
(04:48):
these things will be on people's minds.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
I'm fascinated by how you take such an enormous period
of history and turn it into one novel. I mean,
these are quite complex stories. What's the art to that?
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Well, the story really has to come out of the research.
Is that you can't take a modern love story and
plant it in Tudor times, for example, or in the
Middle Ages. That the way it has to work is
the story idea has to come out of the circumstances
of that historical period. And then of course the characters
(05:28):
that you invent can have all the concerns and all
the hopes and fears of every historical period, but they're
linked directly linked to something specific to the Middle Ages
or the sixteenth century or the Victorian era.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
We were just talking therefore. We were talking before about,
you know, making these characters so relevant. I imagining that
you would look back through history and see a lot
of parallels with modern times.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Well, I think so, although you know what I look
for in every period of history, there are people who rebel.
They say I'm not going to be the person that
I'm told to be. You know, the women all through
history who have said I don't want to be married
(06:23):
and have children. I want to be a scientist, or
I want to be a painter or something like that.
And of course they're the most interesting people who write about.
So although occasionally I'm accused of making the story modern,
the truth of the matter is that not everybody is
(06:44):
typical of the era that they live in, and the
people who go against the tide are the most interesting people.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
What did you learn about stone Hinge that fascinating you.
Maybe you didn't know.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
Well, something that I really didn't know about was the
importance of flint. It's the Stone Age, so they have
no metal tools, so they have no knives.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
The only cutting tool they.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Have is a flint, and they used this, you know,
whatever they did chop down trees. For example, they had
a little a little hand axe and you can't, I can't.
We can't show this on the radio, can be. But
I can show it to you now. So it's it's
smaller than my hand, and I've got little hands, and
(07:32):
that's the kind of thing they would use to chop
down an oak tree. So it must have taken them
a long time, but it was all they had. And
the other thing about it is that the best flint
is found quite deep underground, so they mined it. Now,
we don't think of the Stone Age as being sophisticated
enough to have mines, but in this country, in England,
(07:54):
there are the remains of many flint mines. And I
was able to go down one quite deep. I had
to wear you know, the apparright a that connected me
to the surface in case I stumbled on the ladder,
so that I wouldn't fall to my death.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
And then when I got to.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
The base of the shaft, I saw that there were
tunnels going radially out from the base of the shaft
in all directions, in other words, just like a modern
day coal mine, which I've also been down coal mines
for research, but I had to crawl on my hands
and knees.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
This was one of the.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Most difficult bits of research that I did, crawling around,
cowering about twenty meters underground on my hands and knees.
I had knee patches and elbow patches and gloves and
a helmet investigating try and imagine what it was like
for the Stone Age people who were looking for these
but very valuable flints. And then the importance of that is,
(08:57):
of course they were miners. You can't eat flints. They
had to trade the flints for what they needed, food
and clothing and so on. And that proves to us
that there was trading in the Stone Age, which you know,
we might not have been sure of otherwise. And so
that was the only industry they had, really mining flints
(09:22):
and sharpening them.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
That's called napping.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
You have to hit the flint with a stone in
such a way that a flake comes off and leaves
a sharp edge.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Quite a skill.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
And so that whole industry exists. That I had no
idea that that whole industry existed.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Fascinating the places I'm sure you've been to some very
very interesting places with all the historical novels that you
have written and the research that you've done. Can you
start it out as a journalist, then you became a
thriller writer before turning to these big epic historical novels.
And of course I think everybody has read Pillars of
the Earth. What made you turn to historical fiction.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Well, it was the cathedrals themselves what I was writing
through as I wrote thrillers, because I like thrillers.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I still do like thrillers.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
In fact, I was so deep into one that I
was I was a bit late for this talk with
you this evening.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
I had to be phoned.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
You were told, no, you were on time, No complaints,
good anyway, So I was, I was just interested in
the cathedrals, and I was, I.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Mean, they're very beautiful, that they've been there.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
For hundreds and hundreds of years, but I was interested
in the people who built them and.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
How they built them.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
And you'll obviously this curiosity of mine obviously applies in
a similar way to Stonehenge, although the circumstances are completely
different and the story is completely different. But I I
I thought that there was a great popular novel to
be written about building a cathedral, and a lot of
(11:03):
people didn't agree with me, and some of my publishers
were very nervous about it. I think they thought I
was going to, well, I might write a difficult book,
you know, a book that's really only for intellectuals, or
something like that. And really I was convinced that there
could be a great popular novel about this. One of
(11:25):
my publishers actually took my wife Barbara aside and said,
you've got to stop Ken writing this book.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
It's going to ruin his career.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
And so it was perhaps the only time in my
life when I've been writing, everybody else has been wrong anyway,
that doesn't happen to me anywhere near as often as
i'd like. So anyway, so I was convinced that that
would be it would be a terrific book, and I
went ahead with it. And then of course I really
(11:52):
had to make sure that it was you know, readable
and enjoyable and paid a page turner, because if I
if I'd eased up on that that impulse, then the
publishers would have been proved right anyway, So it's as
you obviously know, it turned out very well, and a
lot of people have really enjoyed that book.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I'm very glad I wrote it.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
It's a bit of an odd question, but we we
live in quite interesting times. Do you ever wish that
you could go into the future and write about what's
happening today? Is historical not is historical fiction?
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (12:26):
That would be interesting, wouldn't it, Because of course in
the future you'd know how all the crises that we're
living through that we know, you know how they ended.
I'm often asked if I'd like to go into the past,
and I would like to talk to Shakespeare. I think
if if if I had a time machine, that would
(12:47):
be my first trip, because I'd like to ask him
about the good things and the and the bad things
in his book. I'd like to I'd like to know
read I mean, his most famous speech, to be or
not to be? That is the question whether it's nobler
in the mind uh to suffer the string spring strings
(13:11):
and arrows of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or
to take arms against the sea of troubles? And wait
a minute, will you can't take arms against a sea?
That's a crap line? Will did you were you in
a hurry or or is there some deep meaning there
that I haven't noticed.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
I'd love to ask him that.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think he's probably very grateful. We haven't devised a
time machine just yet. One other thing I wanted to
quickly ask you about, Ken is that you've been involved
in a lot of charities over the years, and you
were president of the Dyslexia Action for ten years, as
well as many others. What drove you to get involved
in an organization.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
Like that, Well, you know, given the life I've lived,
it seems to me such a tragedy when people can't read,
or can't read without difficulty.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
It's given me such joy. You know, I was obviously
not dyslexic.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
I could read when I was four years old, and
I've loved reading ever since, starting with you know, Noddy
goes to toy Town and all the way through James Bond, and.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
It's given me such joy.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
And I feel it's such a shame if people can't read,
and if there's a way to help them, we should
and I did.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
I was some of the I'm not.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Just some of the people in my family are dyslexic,
and I'm dyslexic and I've seen them struggle with it.
And there was a time when schools just didn't even
believe in dyslexia. And you still come across schools where
they say there's no such thing as dyslexia. But I
think it's great if those people get special help. I
also organized the National Year of Reading in ninety eight
(14:53):
to ninety nine, and the object of that campaign was
to was to persuade people to read for pleasure, because
that's the way you divel your literacy ability is when
you're just doing it for fun, doing it because you
enjoy it, and so and the more the more that
(15:15):
a young person reads for pleasure, the better literacy skills
that person will have all through their life. So so
it's always seemed to me these were very worthwhile. I
know there are one hundred, maybe probably a thousand charities
that are worth supporting, but that was the one that
seemed closest to my heart.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Do you ever stop end reflect on your career? Thirty
eight box, one hundred and ninety eight million copies sold.
I mean, it's pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Well, when I do, I can hardly believe it. I mean,
it's really two hundred million books I mean, how did
that happen? I mean, I was you know, I was
always ambitious. I wanted a lot of people to read
my books. But that just you can't imagine two hundred
million books, can you. I mean, I don't know how
(16:03):
many times they go around the world, end on end.
So I'm sort of I'm sort of gobsmacked when I
think about it. I don't think about it very much,
but when I do think about it and somebody says, how.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Many books have you sold in total?
Speaker 4 (16:17):
And I say, it's one hundred and ninety eight million
at the moment and still rising, and then I think, Wow,
that's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
That's a lot of joy of reading, isn't it a
lot of joy?
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yes? Yes, I hope so, Kin follow, thank.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
You so much for your time. It's been a delight
to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
I enjoyed it very much. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And Kin's new book, Circle of Days, is in stores now.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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