2026-10-08
2 分钟Welcome to Desert Island Discs Postcards.
I'm Lauren Laverne.
We've cast away thousands of people to our imaginary desert island, among them many writers.
Our castaway today is Catlin Moran, whose journey into writing began in a three-bedroom council house in Wolverhampton,
where she lived with her parents and seven siblings.
Back in 2017, Kirsty Young asked her what her most pungent memories were of a cramped childhood.
Pungent is the right word.
It's primarily smells.
The smell of boiling potatoes, the combination of hot dust and kind of chip fat on a curtain,
ice inside the windows, towels mainly.
You know, when you're poor, you don't know what to dry.
Towel is all the towels wet all the time because you're sharing them amongst so many people
and also being able to identify a specific sibling
or parent from their smell that they'd left on a towel you have said that i was raised
on benefits has become my unlikely catchphrase Why do you choose to write about it?
Well, I guess because being brought up as a child of Thatcher,
you know, you're constantly told that kind of, you know, the cream will rise.
You're told that if you do have innate talent, you will progress.
And I look around and go, OK, if that was true, there should be lots of other people
who were raised on benefits who've got jobs like mine, you know, or writers or, you know, screenwriters or whatever.