SOUNDS LIKE BRADBURY

A week tomorrow, the BBC will be broadcasting my new 60-minute dramatisation of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man and from tomorrow and for the next seven days, I will be posting links to my previous audio adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories.

From the day when, as a teenager, I read my first Bradbury book – The Golden Apples of the Sun – I fell hopelessly under the spell of this remarkable teller of tales, Martian Chronicler, purveyor of Dandelion Wine, resident of the October Country who remembered the Day it Rained Forever...

His novels, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes,The Halloween Tree and others and his inimitable collections of short stories with their curious happenings, bizarre and beautiful characters depicted in glittering, shimmering prose became my favourite reading and their author my hero and, eventually, my friend...

Here is a treasure, acquired years later: the original art for Joe Mugnaini's illustration to 'The Wilderness', one of the stories in The Golden Apples of the Sun, the book that electrified my youthful imagination and fired my own desire to write...

Before I begin transporting you to the surreal worlds conjured by Bradbury the magician, here is a radio programme I made BBC World Service about him in 1988, in which he talks about his life, memories and inspirations. The reader is Blain Fairman...