for his humanitarian work. ecuador has brought in new rules that stop venezuelan migrants from entering the country without a passport. more than 4,000 venezuelans fleeing economic crisis at home, have been arriving every day at ecuador‘s border with colombia. indian rescuers in helicopters and boats have braved torrential rain to reach people stranded in flood waters in the southern state of kerala. nearly 200 people have been killed in the past ten days, following unusually heavy monsoon rains. the indian prime minister, narendra modi, described the situation as devastating. wheelchair rugby league can be fast, furious and at times brutal but the sport is experiencing a rise in popularity. developed in france a few years ago, england is prepapring to host the world cup in 2021 and mike bushell has been finding out what it's all about at a training session with the leeds rhinos. if you think that rugby league is tough, look

at the wheelchair version. the thrills, the spills, the dives for the line. this is the sport developed by a frenchman in 2004 that aims to replicate the fast, furious and brutal game of rugby league, but in wheelchairs, and there's a try! when we start getting a good run and some good pace and then just chairs banging into each other, people getting flipped out of chairs and things, it gets quite competitive. it is pretty hard—core, pretty gnarly. you can only pass the ball backwards like in the running game so you're always moving back and knock—ons are a big thing, if you lose control of the ball. it has been life changing for former soldierjames who lost both legs in an explosion in afghanistan. it has made a massive impact on my life and recovery and got me more comfortable with myself. i'm going out there without prosthetics on and my legs are out and i'm in a wheelchair in front of people. it has had a huge impact on me that way but also i have got something to train for now. but this is an all—inclusive sport for all. at least two players on each team can be able—bodied likejosh. anybody can play.

when you're in the wheelchair and all strapped up, there is no real advantage over anybody else. it is your skill compared to theirs. it turns it all on its head really because the person in the wheelchair all the time is probably the more able because they have more skills in a wheelchair than a person that doesn't use one every day. it is very different to the paralympic wheelchair rugby, or murderball as it's known. this is far closer to the actual rugby game with conversions and drop goals. try and get your fist up and under. dave the cameraman got it between the posts. a drop on the floor, straight over. beautiful. it is a lot harder than it looks... ..as you can see. the first challenge is the learning to catch and carry the ball while pushing yourself along. it is only when you enter into a proper game that you really appreciate how physical this can be. apart from smashing into your opponent, you gain possession by removing the tags on their arms, that is the tackle. for newcomers, speed and quick passing seems essential

because the longer you hold onto the ball, the bigger the metal battering you can get. i'm known for hitting people... quite hard! it's being able to make that contact and it's the speed as well. anybody is invited to attend a try out session and there are now 20 teams playing in three leagues across the country. the sport is also set to grow with england hosting the wheelchair rugby world cup in 2021. mike bushell, bbc news, in leeds. now on bbc news, talking books. welcome talking books. we've come here to talk

to dame hilary mantel, the only woman to have won the man booker prize fiction prize twice for her bestselling historical novels wolf hall and bring up the bodies. her otherfiction may take you by surprise, with books about ghosts, the supernatural, and the french revolution. the world of course eagerly awaits the next instalment of the thomas cromwell trilogy, the mirror and the light. hilary mantel, welcome to talking books. we will come to the mirror and the light in due course.

but i want to start with the books you have written. 12 novels, short stories, a memoir, and i was very struck by how very different they are — from 800 pages on the french revolution to performing psychics in suburbia, your subjects are unpredictable. how deliberate is that? it's not really deliberate, but i don't know how people manage to write the same book over and over again, because you grow and you change, your interests change. although to me there are subterranean threads that connect them, however disparate the subject matter they seem to believe. i wonder if by resisting categorisation, did that potentially prevent you building an audience early in your career? i think possibly it did. it is tempting for publishers

and readers to want to put an author into a category. and to that extent they want to be served the mixture as before. and as you say, you cannot predict what i was going to come up with next, and there's a mixture of the contemporary and the historical, which i agree is probably unusual. success, when it came in international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you had been ignored til then? i had had good press, but not many sales. that changed. as soon as wolf hall was published, actually, even before the prize short listings. and i felt i hadn't pushed out my talent to find where it might go. so i still felt like a work in progress. as you said, in many ways, wolf hall was the turning point careerwise. not only in domestic sales, but translations —

i think it went on to 36, 37 languages. and it is just amazing to think that people on the four corners of the earth are reading about henry viii and his wives. what you did was followed up with another man booker prize winner in 2012, didn't you, with bring up the bodies? yes. i did wonder how people's attitudes towards you changed after those victories. do you know, a lot of people thought they were my first books. and lovely, well—meaning people, women mainly would rush up to me and say, how wonderful you did all of this in your 50s. and i would feel a little bit insulted, because i would think, it you know, i have been

writing since i was 22. i wrote for 12 years before i was published. and that is a more typical career. but people love the idea of an overnight success. wolf hall and bring up the bodies, these books cover what must be the most famous periods in english history, the most talked about, the most written about. i think you said to me once that the topics are the british national soap opera, isn't it? what did you think you could add that was new? thomas cromwell is vital to understanding the crucial ten years of henry's reign. and if you would stand where he is standing, this familiar material defamiliarises itself and becomes a much more complex and rich story than we are used to from our schooldays. it is the most remarkable career, and it is the arc of it. the son of the brewer, blacksmith from putney, rising to become earl of essex. you have to ask yourself,

how is that done? thomas cromwell, people say, that's an ingenious man. do you know he knows the whole of the new testament by heart? he is the very man of an argument about god breaks out. he's the very man for telling your tenants 12 good reasons their rents are fair. he's man to cut through some legal entanglement that has ensnared you for three generations. 0r talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make. with animals, women, and timid little ones, his manner is gentle and easy. but he makes your creditors weep. he can converse with you about the caesars,

or get you venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. nobody can out talk him. if he wants to talk. nobody can better keep their head when markets are falling and weeping men are standing in the street tearing up letters of credit. "liz", he says to his wife, one night, "i believe in a year or two, we'll be rich." thank you. in the novels you challenge the traditional views of cromwell. he was always depicted as a villain, but you make a somewhat more sympathetic character, even quite beguiling. so what was it that you discovered to contradict that traditional view? well, i discovered a lot of rubbish, really. errors and prejudices just being kicked along from one

generation of historians to the next. in many ways he deserves his reputation. he was ambitious and unscrupulous. he was hardheaded. he was ruthless. but i think, no more so than the typical courtier of his time. but he was a lot smarter. so it is your view the historians got it wrong? not all of them. it is interesting sometimes, to see what a novelist gets or takes away from a simple piece of documentation that a historian may not notice. but how historically accurate do you feel you have to be? i think you have to be absolutely accurate, as far as the record extends. but of course you have to be challenging the record, and you have to be saying, who wrote this down, and what was his source of information? so in that sense you're getting behind the record. but i think in cromwell‘s case, certainly, you have to be very

suspicious of secondary sources. you see, to the elizabethans, cromwell was a hero. by the time we got to the victorians he was a villain. so something happened at some stage in between, and he is a reflection, like most historical figures, of the times. we are not looking at him, we are looking in a mirror. you explain that very well. i think that is a very interesting point. how and when did you become interested in him? because you had wanted to write about him since the start of your career, hadn't you? i began work on a historical novel and i was very young, 22, not long out of university. and i really saw myself as a historical novelist, and i thought, right, first i will do the french revolution and then i will turn my mind to thomas cromwell. and of course it doesn't work like that.

no one's career is that smooth. and just as well, because i could write about the french revolution then, it was made by young men and women. i was even younger than they were. mostly they were dead by their mid—30s. you were 22? i was in my 20s and 30s when i was working on the book. and i could recognise their spirit and their hope, and their commitment and energy. i couldn't write that book now. but i can write about a man in his 50s building up and accumulating his life's experience. so i think, you know, the time when you get an idea for a book, that is not necessarily the time to execute it. sometimes you have to wait a couple of decades and then pick your moment to strike. 2003, and your memoir, giving up the ghost,

in which you write about your childhood, growing up in the ‘90s in northern england, but you also explain how you came to be a writer. that was not your original plan, you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. what happened ? yes, never under ambitious. ithink... it is difficult, you know? a woman from a working—class background with no connections trying to get into law at that time, i wasn't even interested in being a solicitor, i wanted to be a barrister. it was difficult in those days. i wanted to come to london and the centre of things. but also i had health problems. i had an undiagnosed illness. but i was told that i was imagining it all. but by the time i was 21, really had a sensation of doors

closing on me. and a feeling that i was not going to be able to make a professional career, that my health was in my way, and so i thought, well, i better have something that i am in charge of. and i still had to work, of course. i still had a job, but i started writing in the evenings, on the weekends, and i set my stall out for very big novel that i knew would take many years. but that is the beauty of being 22, because the time just stretches ahead of you. and i still had no connections, and i didn't know anybody who was a writer. but what do you need? well, you need a piece of paper and a pencil and you are ready to go. so you tell me that if you had not been ill, you would not have

become a writer? i certainly would not have taken the decision at that precise time. i think possibly i would have made way way back to writing when i was living abroad, during which time i didn't have any meaningful career, so i think they would have come back to writing at a later stage. but that would not have been the same book, because it would have been a different self. yes. and of course you drew on your experiences in botswana and saudi arabia in novels that you did write. that is right. a change of climate. i wrote about southern africa — although at an earlier era — i wrote about it in the 19505. that was a historical novel of a kind. and then i wrote eight months ghazzah street, set in saudi arabia, reflecting my four years there. we've touched upon your illness, and as you said, it was undiagnosed for many years, and eventually you were diagnosed with endometriosis. that rendered you infertile. i was struck by a lying in giving up the ghost. you wrote "i miss the child i never had — what's to be done but to write them into being?"

is it fair to say you have created the children you never had in yourfiction? it would be more fair to say i've created lives. they're more like a great tribe of brothers and sisters, i think. your people, your world. you realise that you only have one life to live and you want to try on for size all the other lives. and you want to move into different eras and you want to live in a man's body for a while, and all the things that writing enables you to do. you mentioned the french revolution — this epic 800 page novel which was finally published, a place of greater safety,

although it was previously rejected by publishers, that must be difficult, was it? it seemed that someone who would write such a book must be someone of tremendous authority, someone we had heard of from oxford or cambridge. and it wasjust little me. and i don't think people could get their heads around it. they didn't know what it was. and thankfully, what i did, instead of turning around every publisher in london with it, ijust said, stop, this isn't the time, go away, write another book, do the best you can, but make it completely different. which was every day is mother's day. yes, a contemporary novel, short, funny. if that didn't take, i would have thought i was deluded myself and stopped. but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing,

was a very rocky. my morale sank sometimes. i needed a lot of self belief to keep going. but once every day is mother's day it's the right desk, and that was the desk of the literary agent who still looks after me, everything went swimmingly. comparatively. yes. and finally, a place of greater safety was published. it was, and it won the sunday express book of the year prize. and i felt vindicated, in a sense. i mean, you started a huge epic about the french revolution. where does one start? well, manchester was my only choice. between the central reference library and the university. there was a very good collection of material and i simply read everything i could get my hands on. of gossipy victorian biographies. victorian—era biographies. which provided all the colour, the anecdotes, the personalities, and i built up from there.

i've seen the binders and folders of research notes that you have, labelled "people," "places," "customs," "manners." at what point as a writer do you say, "i've done enough research now, i need to start writing?" well, to me, the two things are entwined. you know... you start them together, you run them together, and then until you come into a particular scene you may not know what you need to know. or it may be that some little piece of information that comes your way,

and it need not be information, you might see a picture or hear some music, and it starts you off on a new trail. so you think, right, this is the background music to the scene. i will write the song and we will sing it and change the mood, you know? and you start to describe your event through describing a painting, and it cuts through the complexities. and so you're always looking, not just for information from the historical record, but for a cultural context that will help you frame a scene. and i think that never stops. then, a little later, came another completely different

novel, beyond black. you mentioned at the beginning there are things you return to in your books, and this theme of the supernatural is one of those. so where did this interest in a world beyond ours come from? probably from being brought up as a roman catholic. you're quite convinced that there is another unseen reality that is more potent than this one. and that this world is actually an illusion, something in which we are transitory, and it doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was partly true to me as a small child. i think i lost a sense of it as i grew up and moved away from the church. but that sense of another reality, sitting on your shoulder where your guardian angel is supposed to be, that's very powerful in my life. i really feel that the dead are only a whisper away. do you believe in ghosts?

ghosts! i have to believe in ghosts. beyond black, which is a contemporary novel, and takes place mostly within the m25, is actually a kind of workup for the later novels, because it is all about the dead who won't lie down. the dead are on every page of that book, nattering away about all sorts of banal topics. and the whole theme of talking to the dead and being available to them, i was actually setting the schedule for my next 15 years of work, but i didn't know it at the time. beyond black, which is a contemporary novel, and takes place mostly within the m25, is actually a kind of workup for the later novels, because it is all about the dead who won't lie down. the dead are on every page of that book, nattering away about all sorts of banal topics. and the whole theme of talking to the dead and being available to them, i was actually setting the schedule for my next 15 years of work, but i didn't

know it at the time. which brings us neatly to the mirror and the light, the eagerly anticipated final instalment in your thomas cromwell trilogy. so how is it going? it's going well. it hasjust suddenly taken a leap forward, and just last week i could email my editor and say, since i emailed you last week, i have done 12,000 words, and they are good words. 12,000 words is nothing, but you suddenly think, now, this project, it's pulling away from its moorings, you know? it really wants to be written. and i think i am probably entering into the most frenzied but also, in a way, the most pleasurable days of the writing, where it seems to have taken charge and it is doing it itself. can you envisage a writing life beyond thomas cromwell now?

there is so much i want to do. and notjust in prose but maybe in the theatre as well. and it is just a question of how much stamina have i got, what time have i got left? each project takes years to realise. so i have to have a long think. i have ideas for two or three more novels, and i am going to have to make some hard choices, i think. hillary mantel, thank you so much. hello there, good morning.

last weekend we had the remnants of tropical storm debbie. this weekend it is the turn of ernesto so we will get that in a moment. ahead of that, generally cloudy skies across most parts of the uk on saturday and more cloud coming in from the atlantic. this is not it is that cloud that has been bringing the rain in from the atlantic with the remnants of that earlier tropical storm. some heavy rain for a while. i think very quickly we will see the wetter weather moving away. still quite muggy on sunday. for many parts of the country, sunshine will be at a premium. some heavy rain still for a while across central and southern scotland and northern england. that should move out into the north sea. a few pockets of light rain and drizzle for a while, extending down into

the midlands perhaps. 0n the whole, cloudy and dry in the afternoon, limited sunshine for england and wales. more of that for northern ireland and northern and western scotland. temperatures cooler in scotland, highs of 22 or 23 in and wales. a muggy feel really will continue into the evening and overnight. maybe more breaks in the cloud beginning to filter down into england and wales. lots of cloud coming in. that will keep the temperature is coming up. it might be a warmer night across the northern half of scotland as well. here we find pockets of rain and drizzle around on monday. further drizzle south around weston hills and coasts. best of the sunshine in this generally cloudy airstream is going to be across the more sheltered eastern parts of england and wales. temperatures as high as 25 or 26. doesn't need much sunshine. it will feel quite warm. humid air mass across the uk, south of this string of weather fronts. high pressure in the south, the next weather system arriving in the north—west on tuesday. that rain will turn out to be a bit heavy on the north—west of scotland later in the day.

ahead of it elsewhere, probably a bit more sunshine around. still some areas of cloud, mind you, and a muggy feeling with temperatures around the mid—20s at best. now, that weather system is going to bring some rain. most of it will be closer to the centre of low pressure driving it and the cold front, that weather front there, moves its way southwards. behind it, that north—westerly airflow will drag down cooler and fresher air. probably more sunshine across scotland, northern ireland and northern england, perhaps as far south as mid wales and the midlands. more southern parts of england and wales we are still in that cloudy, muggier air stream and it's here we will see higher temperatures once again looking ahead to the san friday, more weak weather fronts arriving in the north—west. they don't really bring much rain further south but eventually fresher air arrives in the south—east of england. good morning. welcome to breakfast, with rachel burden and roger johnson. 0ur headlines today: police investigating tuesday's car crash outside the houses of parliament charge a man

with attempted murder. tens of thousands remain stranded in southern india's monsoon floods, as troops and helicopters are deployed to the worst—hit areas. a mother abused over her blue disabled parking badge in a hopsital car park calls for more understanding. you cannot buy class — that isjose mourinho's assessment of manchester city, and what he calls their dispresfectful new documentary. good morning. for most it