Kirsty Young's castaway for BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs is the author Vikram Seth (Sc 69-70).

His novel A Suitable Boy was nearly a decade in the writing, but it was a huge and immediate hit and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He is now working on a follow-up novel called A Suitable Girl. He's due to finish work on it in 2013 - 20 years after the original work was published. The pace of work, he admits, is slow: "The sound of deadlines pushing past is one of the sounds that authors are most familiar with - it's very much in the gestational period."

Producer: Leanne Buckle. BBC Radio 4. Desert Island Discs.