Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright and director Stephen Poliakoff. Stephen Poliakoff is probably best known for his explorations of the themes of memory, family and history in his dramas for television, including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince.

He was born into an aristocratic, Russian Jewish family in 1952, the third of four children. Stephen's talent as a dramatist emerged from the embers of his ambition to be an actor. He discovered early that he could write, and his first play, Granny, was sufficiently well received to be made the school play - and to be reviewed by a major national paper. Later, during the 1970s, Stephen began to work in television with films like Stronger than the Sun for Play for Today and Caught on a Train - which won a BAFTA. His television film Close My Eyes won the Evening Standard Best Film Award in 1991; the series Shooting the Past won the Prix Italia in 1999 and in 2002 he won the Dennis Potter Award at the BAFTAs.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Quintet For Clarinet and String Quartet in A Major (Larghetto) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell Luxury: A box of plastic straws to fiddle with