Open Book - 27/12/2009

Mariella Frostrup and her guests discuss a generally unheralded figure in the writing of a book - its editor. Mariella talks to Diana Athill, the former editor of novelists including VS Naipaul, John Updike and Jean Rhys, and herself the author of Stet, an acclaimed memoir of her life in publishing. John Carey, the author of a recent biography of William Golding, explains how Golding's masterpiece Lord of the Flies was saved from the rejects pile - and extensively remodelled - by Golding's first editor. The editor and writer Jenny Uglow reveals some of the tricks of her trade, and the novelists Giles Foden and DJ Taylor discuss how novelists rely on - and sometimes ignore - their editors, from Dickens to the present day.