TV’S Sally has the write stuff all right
Broadcaster Sally Magnusson on telling stories, Icelandic
It has taken a lifetime of working with words, 10 books, a best- selling memoir and her debut novel, but Sally Magnusson is now willing to accept what her readers have known for many years.
She’s a writer.
One of Scotland’s best- known broadcasters after years presenting Reporting Scotland and Songs of Praise, Sally has just published her first work of fiction, The Sealwoman’s Gift.
And with it, she experienced a professional epiphany at the age of 62. Sally said: “I still can’t take myself quite ser iously when described as a novelist.
“But someone asked the other day how they should describe me, and it occurred to me that for years I’ve been described as ‘broadcaster and writer Sally Magnusson’.
“I thought maybe it should be ‘writer and broadcaster’ now. That feels good to me.”
But the mum of five has no inclination to hang up her microphone.
“Not to say anything disparaging about the other part of my work,” she said. “It’s just that the writing has come to mean more and more to me over the years.”
Her new novel came about in the wake of her best- selling memoir Where Memories Go, a candid account of how a family dealt with the gradual disappearance of a loved one descending through the stages of dementia.
It told the poignant story of how Sally and her family learned to cope as her mother Mamie – a former Sunday Post journalist – lived her final years with Alzheimer’s.
The book remained on the bestsellers’ list for months and was praised by people in the caring professions as much as literary critics.
Yet as well as marking her out as a spokesperson on dementia – and leading to the formation of the charity Playlist For Life – its success posed Sally a happy problem.
She said: “My publisher was anxious that I write something else after Where Memories Go did so well.
“We talked about the things that interested me, and I considered writing another non- fiction book about music and dementia.
“But in the end I felt I needed to go somewhere else completely.”
That turned out to be an island off the coast of Iceland in the 1600s.
The Sealwoman’s Gift takes as its starting point one of the most terrifying chapters in Icelandic history, when hundreds of islanders were abducted into slavery by pirates from Morocco. Inspired by the country’s literary sagas, the novel’s heart- wrenching fiction is built around the bloodied bones of fact, words hauled from written records of the 17th Century.
Sally said: “I came across an English translation of Olafur Egilsson’s memoir, and that really opened my eyes to an extraordinary story: this priest who was abducted with his family, taken to Algiers and then has to leave them behind to make his way back to Europe to raise a ransom for them.”
Much of the story centres around Asta, Olafur’s wife.
Sally said: “So little was known about the life of women either in Europe or in Algiers.
“I wondered what their experience was like and how to make that engaging to a modern audience – writing about the reality of that experience in the 17th Century in a way that speaks to the universal experiences of grief, loss, love and so on.”
Years of writing for newspapers didn’t come close to preparing the experienced journalist for the harsh realities of draft- writing works of fiction.
She said: “I don’t think I realised how much I’d bitten off until I started. I was at a dinner with