Nor is that of Jude Kelly, the former artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse.Instead, the contenders are believed to be the RSC associate directors Michael Boyd and Gregory Doran, who is the partner of the actor Antony Sher; an honorary associate director, John Caird, in a partnership with the actor Simon Russell Beale, and the actor- director Michael Pennington.. Blame it on Plato, and his myth of Atlantis. For the past 2,500 years, islands – either real and imaginary – have shimmered like a dream of hope and happiness on the horizon of the Western mind. Show us a smallish island, or simply invent one, and we’ll instantly drum up fantasies of the good life or the perfect commonwealth.

The vision of an island clarifies what we desire – whether the flawless state debated in More’s Utopia and Shakepeare’s Tempest, or merely the eight recordings most likely to soothe a stranded soul. Which (adult) novel has colonised British readers most successfully over the past decade? Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a quintessential island fable of paradise despoiled and restored. As Adam Nicolson, the bewitched owner of the Shiant outcrops in the Hebrides, mused in last year’s finest island book, Sea Room (HarperCollins, £6.99), “islands feed an appetite for the absolute”

Blame it on Plato, and his myth of Atlantis. Not long ago, Channel 4 screened an excruciating documentary about a painfully dim British couple who (with two smarter kids) set out to build their private Utopia on a disputed patch of sand and palms off Nicaragua. Dissent, despair and a terrible death wrecked their dreams, in a textbook demonstration of the Tropical Island as Dystopia.

Not for the first time, I ended up wishing that the gormless victims of reality TV would just read some literature before they signed the contract.So many distinguished island stories throng the canon that you might think no more literary landfalls would be required. But a bold, original novel can always redefine the borders of its genre, and Margaret Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil (Canongate, £9.99) does exactly that. This is a holiday treat of rare distinction: ingenious, gripping, thoughtful, and wonderfully entertaining into the bargain.In the great Utopian tradition, Elphinstone creates a fictitious island-state in order to set in train an adventure yarn that can also function as a sort of thought-experiment. Her imaginary territory of “Hy Brasil”, formerly British Frisland, sits in the North Atlantic not quite half way between County Kerry and Newfoundland. Mysteriously prosperous despite the fisheries crisis and the winding-down of a Nato base, the independent island and its odd people come under the scrutiny of a young Cornish travel writer, Sidony Redruth.