Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the 8 tracks,
book and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons the music's shorter than on the original broadcast but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the filmmaker Norma Percy.
She's been called the pre-eminent political documentary maker of her generation.
Her films tell the story of the conflicts and political upheavals of our times,
from Watergate to Putin's Russia,
taking viewers into the room where big decisions were made with the people who were there.
Her programmes feature world leaders of all political persuasions,
from Bill Clinton and Gerry Adams to Mikhail Gorbachev and Slobodan Milosevic,
allowing their own words and their sometimes conflicting perspectives to take viewers closer to the truth.
She was born in New York and, after a visit to London at 15, became a committed anglophile.
She later studied at the London School of Economics and became a House of Commons researcher before a chance encounter with the journalist and producer Brian Lapping led to her start in television.
Her productions have won many prizes, including an Emmy,
two BAFTAs and four Royal Television Society Awards.
In 2010, she became the first TV documentary maker to win the Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
She says,