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Literary Landscapes - The Lake District

Open Book's summer series on Literary Landscapes begins at the Haweswater Dam, with only a waist high wall separating presenter Mariella Frostrup from 80 billion litres of water, which is what Haweswater Reservoir holds when full, and surrounded by beautiful and majestic mountains on all sides. It's a charged, vital, visceral landscape - immortalised by writers since Wordsworth first wrote about daffodils.

Open Book's literary guide to this "carnal realm of water and earth" is award winning writer Sarah Hall - who this year was on Granta's coveted list of the best 20 British writers under 40.

Sarah was born in a cottage in a mountain range just to the east of Haweswater, and her award winning eponymous first novel, Haweswater, provides a fictional account of the construction of the dam. Sarah talks about a brutal landscape made beautiful by the Romantic poets, and how it's been a challenging legacy for a writer to inherit.

Producer: Hilary Dunn.