Kirsty Wark: Newsnight star finds her literary feet with debut tale of love and belonging

AS host of The Review Show and having presented numerous arts documentaries over the years, broadcaster and journalist Kirsty Wark is well versed in the art of criticism.

So it’s perhaps something of a surprise that she’s chosen to put herself in the firing line by writing a novel, especially given the fact that bad reviews can shoot a career down before it’s even taken off.

But Wark has stepped away from the sanctuary of the television studio and her upcoming literary debut, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle, will be published in March next year.

Set against the stunning background of Arran island off the west coast of Scotland, it is a multi-generational story of love and belonging that revolves around a young woman who inherits a house by chance and slowly begins to unlock its mysteries and heartbreaking secrets. Although it’s taken her out of her comfort zone, Wark says it’s something she’s hankered after for a while.

“I always thought I’d like to write fiction but I didn’t want to force it,” she says. “I actually had the idea nine years ago but I didn’t have the proper story until a couple of years ago.”

Despite her busy schedule as one of the presenters of the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme, she managed to find time to sit down and write it. Although she admits it was a different kind of challenge to her day job.

“It’s very different from doing Newsnight and it’s completely different to TV where you’re working with a team. I love working with a team and the whole creative process where everyone plays a different, but equal part. With writing, though, you’re on your own and you’re absorbed with yourself and the story you’re writing.”

She divides her time between London and Scotland and says the train journey actually helps. “With writing you really need to shut yourself away but this gives me four clear hours to write, which is great,” she says.

“It definitely isn’t easy, but I love being a writer and I’ve already started the next one although it’s at a very early stage.”

Wark will be discussing her new novel, as well as the importance of place in the Brontës’ novels, with Professor Ann Sumner, director of the Brontë Society, in her talk on women and literature at the Ilkley Literature Festival next week.

She’s looking forward to visiting Yorkshire again. “I remember visiting Haworth and I thought it was just the most amazing, magical and wonderfully atmospheric place.”

So was she, like so many impressionable young readers, captivated by the world created by the Brontë sisters? “I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre as a child, but it wasn’t until I read Wuthering Heights aloud to my children when they were about 11 or 12, that I realised how challenging it is. I always had this image of Laurence Olivier in my head and I’d glossed over Heathcliff’s darker side.

“He was a vicious, difficult man and he was actually quite abusive. He’s a strong character, but of equal importance is the character of the Moors themselves which are dark and brooding and dangerous.”

Wark was born in Dumfries and brought up in Kilmarnock. She won a place at an all-girls’ school in Ayr and went on to study history at Edinburgh University. She joined the BBC at the age of 21, working as a researcher for BBC Radio Scotland, a job she “absolutely adored”.

It fired her passion to be a journalist. “I had a feeling for journalism, I wanted to tell stories and find out things and tell them to people. You’re a conduit to the reader, or viewer, and it’s your job to make sense of things so that your audience has a sense of what’s going on.”

In 1988, she was one of the first reporters on the scene covering the Lockerbie disaster, when a Pan AM flight from London to New York exploded over the town. All 259 passengers on board the plane were killed along with 11 people on the ground in what remains the biggest terrorist attack ever to take place in Britain.

“I knew the area and we managed to get in just before the police put up barriers and closed off the town. I remember the first thing I noticed was this eerie silence, it was dreadful,” she says. With nowhere to go she ended up spending the night with a family who kindly let her sleep upstairs in a spare room. Even for a savvy, hard-nosed journalist like Wark, the scenes of devastation she encountered are impossible to forget.

“It was the first time I realised about post-traumatic stress disorder, not for me, I was just a reporter, but for the police and the army and what they had to see up on that hill. It made you understand the importance of counselling.”

Wark is one of the country’s most respected journalists and she came to prominence following her 1990 interview with Margaret Thatcher in which she incensed the Prime Minister with a series of hostile questions about the poll tax. She says Mrs Thatcher actually came to see her beforehand.

“She tried to talk about women’s issues because she knew I was a feminist, so she’d done her homework. But I only had 30 minutes and I knew I couldn’t get sidetracked, I was quite steely about it.”

Downing Street reportedly hadn’t wanted the Prime Minster to be interviewed by another woman. “If you think about it she was hardly ever interviewed by another woman,” she says.

It made Wark’s name, but looking back how does she view Mrs Thatcher’s legacy?

“Politically, she was an extraordinary force of nature and she changed the country for good or ill, she changed the fabric of British society. She was a strong leader and she had a definite vision of how she wanted the world to be.”

Wark has been part of the Newsnight team since joining back in 1993, and along with Jeremy Paxman and Gavin Esler is seen as one of its big hitters. “We all get on, it’s a very supportive group although, having said that, we rarely see each other because we’re all working at different times. But I’ve known Jeremy since the early 80s when we worked on Breakfast Time.”

So what does she think of her colleague’s beard, which has been causing such a fuss on Twitter? “I don’t think he’d be happy with me if I waded into that,” comes the diplomatic, if slightly disappointing, reply.

As a prominent TV broadcaster, she’s sometimes found herself under the unforgiving glare of media commentators who feel the need to comment on how long, or short, her skirts are. This would upset some people but Wark dismisses such cheap criticism as something that “comes with the territory”.

“If you’re on TV there’s always someone who will have a pop at you now and then. I try and wear something that is comfortable, hopefully modern and hopefully stylish. But my job is to interview people and to do that to the highest standard.”

Newsnight has long been held up as a bastion of quality journalism, but the programme was heavily criticised after a scandal which saw an investigation into Jimmy Savile’s sex crimes dropped and a separate story that led to Lord McAlpine being wrongly accused of child abuse.

“The spotlight was on us and not in a way we would have wanted. But we kept our heads down and kept doing our jobs. It was very important to keep an even keel, which I think we did,” she says.

However, of all the high pressure jobs she’s done during her career, she says appearing on the cookery show MasterChef was one of the most stressful.

“You don’t get any extra time and there’s no cheating, although I did make some of Phil Vickery’s pastry, I’d like that to go on record,” she says, laughing.

At the age of 58, Wark has lost none of her journalistic verve but admits that writing fiction has opened up new doors for her.

“It’s illuminated another side of my brain and I’m reassured by that,” she says. “I’m in my 50s and I feel I have a lot of ideas for other things and hopefully I can find a strategy for combining the two.”

Kirsty Wark is appearing at the Ilkley Literature Festival, on October 19. For more information visit www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk or call the box office on 01943 816714.

Kirsty Wark: Celtic Tigress

Kirsty Wark was born in Dumfries and educated in Kilmarnock.

She joined the BBC as a graduate researcher in 1976 for BBC Radio Scotland, going on to become a producer in radio current affairs.

After a spell on Radio 4’s The World At One, she moved to television in 1983.

She has interviewed many top politicians, but her most memorable interview was in 1990 when she conducted a headline-making interview with the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

From 1990-1993 she presented the arts programme The Late Show and in 1993 fronted the popular BBC heritage series One Foot In The Past.

She became one of the Newsnight presenters in 1993.

In 2001 she also became a regular presenter of Newsnight Review and subsequently presenter of the Glasgow-based Review Show.

Wark also presents an occasional series of interviews for BBC Four with guests as wide-ranging as Toni Morrison, Hannan Ashrawi, Madonna and Woody Allen.

In 2011, she participated in Celebrity MasterChef where she reached the final, won by Phil Vickery.

She has won several 
major awards for her work including Bafta Scotland Journalist of the Year in 
1993, Best Television Presenter in 1998, and was nominated for the Richard Dimbleby Award for Best Television Presenter in the Baftas in 2000.

Wark is married to Alan Clements and has two children.