Published: May 19-25 2001 by: Daily Echo Magazine

Lucy Jago's life has suddenly changed. Her debut book is about to be published, she's just moved back from London to Lilliput, Poole... and the birth of her baby is imminent.

Everything is happening at once and the former pupil of Talbot Heath School in Bournemouth, who became a television producer then gave it all up to write a biography, is being feted by the media, from Radio Four's Start the Week to The Daily Telegraph.

Her book, The Northern Lights, is a biography of Kristian Birkeland, a visionary Norwegian scien- tist found dead in a Japanese hotel 84 years ago. One of the mysteries of the world at the time was the aurora borealis, the northern lights that arc across the night skies above places like the moun- tains of arctic Norway. Birkeland solved the riddle of the lights...but nobody believed him.

It cost him his mental stability, his marriage and, ultimately, his life.

Now the story of Birkeland's troubled life has changed Lucy's. How did that happen?

Lucy Jago is an elegant, attractive, fresh-faced woman in her early 30s with that subtle bloom of motherhood, an armful of achievements already behind her and a willingness to admit to feeling nervous about what the future holds in store. Born in Bristol, she came to Me,yrjck Park in Bournemouth when her surgeon father and the family moved south, attending St Martin's in Charminster ("a sweet school") and then Talbot Heath. "I think I was ever so slightly naughty there and they said I should be an actress or a hairdresser because I had no academic talent at all," she recalled, ironically.

At 16 she left, went to St Christopher's, a pro- gressive school near London, then on to Kings College, Cambridge, where she achieved a double first.

"I absolutely blossomed at St Christopher's but I'm glad I had the discipline that Talbot Heath inspired. They made you work."

After doing an art history masters degree at London University she turned her back on being an academic, knowing she wanted to write books but lacking the confidence to get started. Instead she became a radio researcher then moved swiftly on, producing and directing television documentaries.

Programmes on which she worked included Brother Felix and the Virgin Saint, with Bamber Gascoigne, following the course of a 14th-century pilgrimage across Europe, and a sensitive documen- tary called Is Anybody Out There about a blind piano tuner to celebrities who went deaf: ("He was just incredibly inspiring," said Lucy, who learnt signing to help her communicate with her subject.)

But it was when filming the BBC series The Planets last year that she came across the name of Kristian Birkeland, the genius who was to change the course of her life.

The film crew had flown to Tronso in Norway to shoot the programme about the Northern Lights but needed a human story to make it come to life. And she heard the story of Professor Birkeland, the man who discov- ered that magnetic field lines guided the sun's cathode rays to the Earth's atmosphere causing the aurora borealis phenomenon.

The scientific establishment did not believe him and throughout his life he battled to prove his point. He fell in love, married then lost his wife through his obsession with work.

He became unstable as he tried again and again to convince the establishment about his findings and finally died in a hotel room in Tokyo, half a world away from his home.

A few months later Lucy Jago was making another film when she decided to write the book.

"I just could not get the story out of my head it affected me so much," she said. "I had just turned 30 and thought 'come on, be brave'."

First she went part-time, giving herself time to start her research in the Science Library in London and then she flew back to Tronso.
"I saw some wonderful aurora then," she recalled.
"They were literally out of this world. 1 used to walk up from my hotel at night and go on to the roof of the observatory, then lie on the snow and watch these amazing streamers of light playing on the sky.
"They were mainly green and white with some violet colour and occasionally a red tinge. You could not believe that they did not make a noise and expected some incredible violin music or trumpets to start playing."

As we sit looking over the blue sky of Poole Bay from her parents' flat in Canford Cliffs, her face radiates excitement at the memory.

But how did she manage to transform the idea into publishing the book?

First she drafted a detailed proposal for the biography and recruited the help of the agent who had acted on behalf of Dava Sobell, the bestselling author who wrote Longitude about that scientific discovery.
"Then, luckily, a friend sent me an e-mail about a competition being run by the Biographers Club for new writing. I entered and, to my complete astonishment I won.
"They gave me £1,000 which is not to be sniffed at, and people started taking me more seriously:"
From then it was compBcratively plain sailing. There was an auction to publish her book. Twelve publishers wanted it and she eventually chose Penguin publishers, Hamish Hamilton.
With so many people trying to get their books pub-lisheddoes she regard herself as very lucky?
"I think it is because it is non-fiction," she said, sipping a clip of Earl Grey tea.
"If you are writing novels it is extremely hard to get published. If you are writing non-fiction, you have a good proposal and can string a sentence together fairly well, they can see if it is a good story. It is less of a gamble for the publisher."
With all the research The Northern Lights took Lucy about 18 months to write, made possible thanks to an advance from her publishers.
"It is quite expensive doing the research," she said.
"You have to travel to do res~arch:' she said, pointing out that Birkeland's story spanned Norway, Cairo and Tokyo.
"It was a complete fluke coming across the story and I was surprised so many people thought it would be a success because it is a very obscure subject. I was never sure anybody would be interested but I was detennined to write it anyway; I completely fell in love with the story of the man.
As well as making the breakthrough on the cause of the aurora borealis, he was a brilliant inventor holding 59 patents from everything from a gun that used electricity to a furnace to produce fertiliser and from an early radiation blanket to a mechanical hearing aid.
But he was a workaholic who felt betrayed, was haunted by depression and died a mysterious death as a result of a drug overdose in that lonely room.
"What drew me to him so much was that he was so driven in his work and yet so human as well. There was a contrast between a very real person and a very abstract science."
Some biographers are said to fall in love with their subjects. Birkeland was an eccentric character. Would she have liked him?
"I think so," she said. "He inspired complete loyalty and terrible rivalry. 1 think 1 would have been one of the disciple-types. But to be married to him must have been a disaster. He even arranged a lecture on his wedding day.
"The end of his life was terribly sad and 1 just thought the man should be better known. "He did incredible work and it became a bit of a crusade."

A very successful one. Her book is now out in Britain and American publishers are reported to have dug deep in their pockets to publish it there soon. Lucy is now planning her next book about an Indian scientist, which Penguin has said they will publish.

Right now, though, her thoughts are on settling into her new home in Lilliput and looking after her baby. "I love it here," she said. "In London when you write, after a few hours you get hunched up. "Down here you just go for a good, long, stretchy walk. I did some of the writing down here and it was bliss. The harbour is beautiful and the beaches are wondeIful. And people down here are so nice after London. They remember you."

Later this year she and her baby will be taking a break in Mallorca, then on to New York for her book launch and then to Calcutta next year to do more research... with her baby. Meanwhile she has just finished reading Jeremy Paxman's book The English. What's by her bedside right now?
"You'll laugh, but I'm reading a book by Gina Fordcalled The Contented Baby." I didn't laugh.