BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
Lauren Laverne here.
We're taking our Easter break, so until we're back on air,
we're showcasing a few programmes from our archive for you.
As usual, the music's been shortened for rights reasons.
This week's guest is the writer Calm to Bean.
Kirsty Young cast him away in January 2016.
My castaway this week is the writer Con Tobin.
His novels, plays and short stories give voice to highly regarded works dealing with identity,
loss, notions of family and the meaning of home.
These days his own home is often Dublin, on occasion New York,
now and then Barcelona and at times a little place near Enniscorthy,
the town in South East Ireland where he grew up and where,
aged just 12, he would begin to write as a release from speech.
One of five children, his father was a teacher at the local school, his mother a published poet.
The little front parlour of their family home boasted two bookcases crammed with history volumes.
Yet interest in the past didn't preclude engagement in the future.
His grandfather became a political prisoner in the fight against British rule and his father was a member of the Republican Fiona Foyle Party.
It was shock at his father's sudden death and the untreated and untouched grief that it gave rise to that would,
many decades later, fuel a novel that was 14 years in the writing.