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 eight 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 artist Peter Layton.
Known as the Grand Master of Glass, he's a founding father of the British Studio Glass Movement, which has carved out,
or should that be blown out, a niche in contemporary art that now belongs to this ancient material.
His work has been exhibited and acquired by some of the world's finest museums,
and his collectors include Sir Elton John and the late Duchess of Kent.
He was born in 1937 in Prague, where his father worked in a glass factory.
But when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, his family fled to Britain, settling in Bradford,
where he followed in the footsteps of his friend David Hockney at their local art college.
He trained as a ceramicist before falling in love with glassmaking when he saw a demonstration at a summer workshop.
He says, how lucky can you be?
To do something you really love, working in an extraordinary material with special properties
and myriad possibilities, creating things that thankfully people sometimes decide they need to enhance their lives.
Peter Layton, welcome to Desert Island Discs.