Episodes

  • Roger McGough: Collected Poems 1959-2024

    Roger McGough: Collected Poems 1959-2024
    Jul 17 2024
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Roger McGough, whose new The Collected Poems: 1959-2024 anthologises a poetic career 65 years long and counting. Roger tells me about revisiting his old work and making it new, why he's 'not being serious' about the future of Poetry Please, and how he narrowly missed being on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.
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    35 mins
  • Michael Nott: Thom Gunn's Cool Queer Life

    Michael Nott: Thom Gunn's Cool Queer Life
    Jul 10 2024
    My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Michael Nott, author of the new biography Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life. He tells me about the poet's early trauma, his transatlantic identity, his unconventional family and his compartmentalised life, part teaching and writing, part sex, drugs and rock and roll.
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    29 mins
  • Kathleen Jamie: Cairn

    Kathleen Jamie: Cairn
    Jul 3 2024
    In her new book Cairn, the Scots poet Kathleen Jamie sets a capstone of sorts on her trilogy of short prose collections Findings, Surfacing and Sightlines. She joins Sam on this week’s Book Club podcast to talk about why she hesitates to call herself a nature writer, how prose found her late in life, and why whale-watching isn’t what it used to be.

    Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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    24 mins
  • Åsne Seierstad: The Afghans

    Åsne Seierstad: The Afghans
    Jun 26 2024
    My guest for this week's Book Club is the journalist and author Åsne Seierstad. She tells me about her new book The Afghans: Three Lives Through War, Love and Revolt; how and why she constructed a novelistic narrative about real-life people and events, and what her encounters with human rights activist Jamila, Taliban commander Bashir and thwarted student Ariana can tell us about the past, present and future of that troubled country.

    Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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    48 mins
  • Mark Bostridge: In Pursuit of Love

    Mark Bostridge: In Pursuit of Love
    Jun 19 2024
    My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Mark Bostridge. In his new book In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter, Mark describes his quest to uncover the traces of Adele Hugo and the doomed love affair which cost her her sanity. He tells me how Adele’s story chimed in poignant ways with his own life and what it taught him about the unstable emotional contract between biographer and subject.
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    41 mins
  • Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings

    Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
    Jun 12 2024
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Marlon James, who ten years ago published his Booker Prize winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. He tells me how that remarkable book came about, how he feared it would be 'my Satanic Verses', what genre means to him, the importance of myth, and what he learned from the X-Men.
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    40 mins
  • Richard Flanagan: Question 7

    Richard Flanagan: Question 7
    Jun 5 2024
    In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan, talking about his extraordinary new book Question 7. It weaves together memoir, reportage and the imaginative work of fiction. Flanagan collides his relationship with his war-traumatised father and his own near-death experience with the lives of H G Wells and Leo Szilard, the Tasmanian genocide and the bombing of Hiroshima. He talks to me about the work fiction can do, the intimate association of memory with shame, and the liberations and agonies of thinking of non-linear time.
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    33 mins
  • The legacy of Franz Kafka

    The legacy of Franz Kafka
    May 29 2024
    June 3rd marks the centenary of Franz Kafka's death. To talk about this great writer's peculiar style and lasting legacy, I'm joined by two of the world's foremost Kafka scholars. Mark Harman has just translated, edited and annotated a new edition of Kafka's Selected Stories, while Ross Benjamin is the translator of the first unexpurgated edition of Kafka's Diaries. They tell me what they understand by 'Kafkaesque', the unique difficulties he presents in editing and translation, and the unstable relationship between his published works, his notebooks and his troubled life.
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    50 mins