Open Book - 14/02/2010

Mariella Frostrup talks to Australian writer Peter Carey, whose celebrated novels include Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. He talks about his latest, Parrot and Olivier in America, and reflects on why lonely children feature so heavily in his fiction. Liz Thomson joins Mariella to reveal the ways in which publishers persaude reluctant celebrities to join the ranks of their authors. And Jon McGregor, whose new novel Even the Dogs tells the story of an impoverished alcoholic, and Peter Kemp, fiction editor of the Sunday Times, talk about the tradition of writing about the dispossessed.