Interviewed at the Hay Literary Festival, Dame Jacqueline Wilson wonders are people losing ‘reading stamina?’
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, prolific children’s author Wilson is concerned that children’s books are now too simple. …
We’re currently listening to The Everywoman (BBC Radio 4) and BBC Sounds. This neat, two-part documentary poses the question:
If there is an ‘Everyman’ in literature, can the experiences of a female character also be universal?
Novelist Sarah Hall (Burntcoat, Sudden Traveller, Madame Zero, The Wolf Border and others) goes in search of the Everywoman. …
This BBC Arts thread continues on the iPlayer with Inside Cinema’s Strong Female Characters. It’s a barely-there critique that fails to nail marketing over actual writing. …
Lose yourself in timeless fiction from literary greats, a collection of one hundred stories in unabridged audio from BBC Sounds.
A collection of timeless fiction from the literary greats from Austen to Elliot, Dickens to Maupassant, Conan Doyle to Wharton. …
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BBC Teach and First Story collaborate with contemporary writers to produce a new set of creative writing resources, Inside the Writer’s Mind. A mix of video and document resources, six of the films in the BBC series are accompanied by a free classroom PDF by First Story. …
BBC Arts’ Tom Churchill mocked up five publishing design clichés that pervade the book stands. From the airport blockbuster thriller, to the fantasy epic, to the literary prize-winner, he pulls out laughably bad real examples that have sold by the truck load. …
The History of the Future is a ten-part documentary on BBC4 Extra.
Juliet Gardiner looks at how cultures of the past viewed the possibilities of the future, and what these visions say about the pre-occupations of the time.
Or as I like to call it – Where’s My Jetpack? …
The BBC’s Our World thread continues with Crossing Steinbeck’s America.
As America grapples with a deepening recession, white-collar workers lose their homes in increasing numbers. Paul Mason travels the country down the same road as John Steinbeck’s migrants in The Grapes of Wrath. Visiting homeless shelters along the way, he unexpectedly finds a growing number of middle-class people who have ended up on the street. …
“Irving Finkel collects ordinary people’s lives. He hoards their life stories in diary form and has amassed a collection of hundreds of handwritten volumes. But Irving has a problem. What should he do with them? The diaries are crammed onto shelves and piled up in corners of his small office. Irving’s day job is Assistant Keeper in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum.”
The Man Who Saves Life Stories was one of those little gems that Radio 4 produces; the story of a museum curator and British eccentric who fell into collecting diaries and is now trying to house that collection as a ‘people’s history’ thing. …
BBC Radio 4, Front Row Hay Festival debate: “Do we publish too many books?”
Podcast Fri, 29 May 2015, duration 29 mins
From the Hay Literary Festival, BBC Radio 4’s arts show Front Row asks the question “Do we publish too many books?” In a lively panel discussion, Samira Ahmed heads a panel of publishers, journalists and authors: Philip Jones editor of the trade journal The Bookseller, Crystal Mahey-Morgan Digital Sales and Marketing Director at Zed Books, Alexandra Pringle, the group editor in chief of Bloomsbury and Ali Sparks author of 41 books for children. …
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