Episodes
| First Broadcast | Repeated | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 20221018 | The Chair of this year's Booker Prize jury, Neil MacGregor, explores what this year's crop of novels submitted for the prize tells us about the literry imagination and psyche after two extraordinary years dominated by the covid pandemic. What imagined worlds have this year's shortlisted novelists created and what do they tell us about the times we are living through? Neil and his fellow jury members academic and broadcaster Shahidba Bari, historian Helen Castor, Novelist and critic M. John Harrison and the novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou, talk about the threads linking the diverse novels on the shortlist. They discuss the power of long memory, the resonance of past events lived out in the present, religion and the world beyond conventional truth and the reality that rather than instant response to the extraordinary, it seems that novelists have been at their most compelling when dealing with themes and events that have, as one jury member put it, had time to 'cure and for rage to be suitably polished'. Recorded before the prize winner decision is made, we hear something of the agonising process of ordering the inherently disordered. The Shortlist includes: Producer: Tom Alban Booker chair Neil MacGregor reflects on fiction writers' responses to our turbulent times. | |
| 20221018 | 20221024 (R4) | The Chair of this year's Booker Prize jury, Neil MacGregor, explores what this year's crop of novels submitted for the prize tells us about the literry imagination and psyche after two extraordinary years dominated by the covid pandemic. What imagined worlds have this year's shortlisted novelists created and what do they tell us about the times we are living through? Neil and his fellow jury members academic and broadcaster Shahidba Bari, historian Helen Castor, Novelist and critic M. John Harrison and the novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou, talk about the threads linking the diverse novels on the shortlist. They discuss the power of long memory, the resonance of past events lived out in the present, religion and the world beyond conventional truth and the reality that rather than instant response to the extraordinary, it seems that novelists have been at their most compelling when dealing with themes and events that have, as one jury member put it, had time to 'cure and for rage to be suitably polished'. Recorded before the prize winner decision is made, we hear something of the agonising process of ordering the inherently disordered. The Shortlist includes: Producer: Tom Alban Booker chair Neil MacGregor reflects on fiction writers' responses to our turbulent times. |