Poet Naush Sabah is re-visiting her childhood home in Sparkbrook, Birmingham Naush is a poet, writer, editor, critic and educator based in the West Midlands. In 2019, she co-founded the Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director. Naush also co-founded Pallina Press where she is Editor-at-Large and she currently serves as a trustee at Poetry London. Her writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, the TLS, PN Review, The Dark Horse, Modern Poetry in Tra...
Sep 22, 2022•13 min
Writer Professor Thomas Glave has been in London and is returning on a train at night to his home city of Birmingham. Thomas was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. His work has earned many honours, including the Lambda Literary Award in 2005 and 2008, an O. Henry Prize, a Fine Arts Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship to Jamaica. He's the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, The Torturer's Wife, an...
Sep 21, 2022•14 min
Writer Dr Shahed Yousaf is driving home to Birmingham from a very demanding day at work in prison. Shahed is a GP who works in prisons, substance misuse centres and with the homeless community. He has just published a memoir: Stitched Up. He spends his time running between emergencies - from overdoses to assaults, from cell fires to suicides - with one hand always hovering over the panic button. He was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize 2016 and commended for the Faber & Faber FAB ...
Sep 20, 2022•14 min
Writer Helen Cross is remembering how clubbing in 90s Birmingham and an encounter with an oil painting in Birmingham's Museum and Art Gallery led her to feel at home in this city. Helen is the author of novels, stories, radio plays and screenplays. Her first novel, My Summer of Love, won a Betty Trask Award and became a BAFTA award-winning feature film. Her recent work includes a BBC Afternoon Play The Return of Rowena The Wonderful and a five-part audio drama series: English Rose. Helen teaches...
Sep 19, 2022•13 min
For the final essay in the series, architectural designer Christopher Laing gives a personal account of how he started Signstrokes, which introduces standardised sign language for architecture. Deaf people are not new to architecture, however they face significant barriers because the sign language vocabulary of the profession is not standardised and lacks terms to express architectural concepts uncommon in everyday language. Christopher, drawing upon his own difficult experience at university, ...
Sep 16, 2022•14 min
Dr Robert Adam is an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University and a lecturer in Linguistics, British Sign Language and Deaf Studies. In the course of his essay, Robert asks, who are the arbiters of British Sign Language? How can its evolution be managed? Robert shares how fewer deaf children are learning British Sign Language at school, and more are now learning it later in life, as young adults. From an outsider’s perspective this may seem relatively harmless, but this language deprivation...
Sep 15, 2022•13 min
Deepa Shastri, an actress, sign song performer and British Sign Language consultant. Deepa explores how Deaf culture and sign language being represented in the arts is so important to the deaf community but also how the arts and sign language naturally go hand in hand - due to the visual and expressive nature of sign language. Back in the 80s, when Marlee Matlin became the first deaf Oscar winner for her performance in 'Children of a Lesser God', things were about to become very exciting for the...
Sep 14, 2022•13 min
Tina Kelberman shares her experience of growing up in a large deaf Jewish family. Her family has inherited deafness for six generations now and are probably also the biggest Deaf Jewish family in the UK. Whilst their culture is steeped in history, spanning back almost two centuries, it's been a rocky road for them - as Tina shares. She hated the feeling of people watching her family communicate in sign language. Her parents also hated it and so did her grandparents- to the point where their sign...
Sep 13, 2022•13 min
Dr Robert Adam is an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University and a lecturer in Linguistics, British Sign Language and Deaf Studies. In his essay, 'Sign Language through the Ages', Robert explores the rich and layered history of British Sign Language. He recalls the first time he read a piece of deaf history - his father’s school published ‘Utmost for the Highest’ for its centenary in 1962, and was full of black and white photos of stern looking people and impressive edifices. The faces and...
Sep 12, 2022•13 min
In 1945, when World WarII finally ended and while Europe's artistic centres smouldered, in New York City an artistic renaissance, in music, painting, theatre, and literature, burst forth out of the city’s bohemia. Most of this work was generated in a single neighbourhood of Manhattan: Greenwich Village. World War II in America was a time of national unity, a singleness of purpose where non-conformity had no place in military or civilian life. Yet somehow as soon as the war ended, a full-blown no...
Jul 01, 2022•14 min
In 1945, when World War II finally ended and while Europe's artistic centres smouldered, in New York City an artistic renaissance, in music, painting, theatre, and literature, burst forth out of the city’s bohemia. Most of this work was generated in a single neighbourhood of Manhattan: Greenwich Village. World War II in America was a time of national unity, a singleness of purpose where non-conformity had no place in military or civilian life. Yet somehow as soon as the war ended, a full-blown n...
Jun 30, 2022•14 min
In 1945, when World War II finally ended and while Europe's artistic centres smouldered, in New York City an artistic renaissance, in music, painting, theatre, and literature, burst forth out of the city’s bohemia. Most of this work was generated in a single neighbourhood of Manhattan: Greenwich Village. World War II in America was a time of national unity, a singleness of purpose where non-conformity had no place in military or civilian life. Yet somehow as soon as the war ended, a full-blown n...
Jun 29, 2022•14 min
In 1945, when World War II finally ended and while Europe's artistic centres smouldered, in New York City an artistic renaissance, in music, painting, theatre, and literature, burst forth out of the city’s bohemia. Most of this work was generated in a single neighbourhood of Manhattan: Greenwich Village. World War II in America was a time of national unity, a singleness of purpose where non-conformity had no place in military or civilian life. Yet somehow as soon as the war ended, a full-blown n...
Jun 28, 2022•14 min
In 1945, when World War II finally ended and while Europe's artistic centres smouldered, in New York City an artistic renaissance, in music, painting, theatre, and literature, burst forth out of the city’s bohemian. Most of this work was generated in a single neighbourhood of Manhattan: Greenwich Village. World War II in America was a time of national unity, a singleness of purpose where non-conformity had no place in military or civilian life. Yet somehow as soon as the war ended, a full-blown ...
Jun 27, 2022•14 min
Joanna Robertson argues that it's the regular, everyday moments and rituals that make up and frame the fabric of our lives. The details of dress or speech that shape and project an identity. Painters capturing an essence in time, like that of Madame Cezanne in Provence, dressed in blue, hair pulled tautly back into a bun, sitting next to a table with a white cup and saucer, spoon standing upwards in the cup. Or the myriad details, from by-passers to snippets of conversations to the design of a c...
Jun 24, 2022•14 min
Joanna Robertson believes it's the everyday moments that shape, frame and colour our lives. That includes observing, or imagining, the lives of others around us. Are portraitists creating a mere image, or capturing the authentic selves of their subjects? The celebrated Belle Epoque painter Giovanni Boldini became a darling of Parisian society with his glamorous portrayals of society women, but a spontaneous portrait of a wealthy couple's gardener in eastern France, possibly painted for Boldini's...
Jun 23, 2022•14 min
'It's only the minutiae of life that are important,' wrote the Austro-Hungarian author Joseph Roth, announcing that he was 'going for a walk'. Joanna Robertson feels, and does, the same, and finds that far from small, the minutiae are actually infinite. Just walking from her Paris flat to a nearby bakery, yields so many observations, memories and encounters, that they conjure up the life of the whole street. From the homeless man sleeping, and dying, on the monastery's front steps, to the blazin...
Jun 22, 2022•14 min
The minutiae of the everyday frame, shape and colour our lives. Joanna Robertson lives in Paris, and finds that the views from her fourth-floor flat have a real influence on her daily life. Looking out over the neighbourhood of Montparnasse, her windows let her eye and mind wander over the sites of much recent and not so recent cultural history. Former residents whose residences she can still see, range from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett to Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth. And, following i...
Jun 21, 2022•14 min
The minutiae of life have always fascinated Joanna Robertson. Moments like opening the curtains or shutters in the morning, putting the key in the lock when returning home, making dinner, or smelling the cooking of the neighbours. The author Virginia Woolf dismissed everyday repetitive rituals as 'moments of non-being', by contrast to epiphanies of experience or understanding that she saw as 'moments of being'. Joanna Robertson argues that on the contrary, the deceptively insignificant everyday ...
Jun 20, 2022•14 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Concluding the series, Paterson Joseph retraces the footsteps of pioneering writer, composer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho through Westminster to a lost grave beneath the still-pulsing streets. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham
Jun 17, 2022•14 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today, Anita Sethi journeys to the grave of her heroine Anne Brontë, overlooking the sea she so loved, and considers why she was buried high on a hill in Scarborough, away from her better known sisters. Her grave has over the years been neglected and ravaged by the elements, but more recently - like her reputation - restored. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham...
Jun 16, 2022•13 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today, Diana Souhami steps into the tomb of Radclyffe Hall in London’s Highgate Cemetery, where The Well of Loneliness author resides with her lover, her lover’s husband and their dog Tulip – an aptly unconventional set-up in death as in life. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham
Jun 15, 2022•14 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Paul Muldoon recalls numerous pilgrimages to the rugged west coast of Ireland, where the remains of WB Yeats may or may not be buried, as per his poetical final request. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham
Jun 14, 2022•14 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Lauren Elkin finds Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise, Paris - where the outsider in life overshadows in death the greats of French literature who jostle for space in the famous cemetery. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham
Jun 13, 2022•13 min
From full stops to emojis, a Tudor letter to texting - how has the use of punctuation marks developed over the centuries? Florence Hazrat thinks about the way brackets help us understand the pandemic. The first parentheses appear in a 1399 manuscript by the Italian lawyer Coluccio Salutati, but - as her essay outlines - it took over 500 years for the sign born at the same time as the bracket, the exclamation mark (which printers rather aptly call “bang”) to find its true environment: the interne...
May 05, 2022•14 min
Xangô (the god of thunder) and Paso Ñañigo’, composed by the Cuban Moises Simons, were two of the numbers performed by Elsie Houston in the clubs of Paris in the 1920s. Also able to sing soprano in Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, Elsie's performances in Afro-Brazilian dialects chimed with the fashion for all things African. Adjoa Osei's essay traces Elsie's connections with Surrealist artists and writers, (there are photos of her taken by Man Ray), and looks a...
Apr 29, 2022•14 min
Africa's first filmmakers boldly revealed how, and why, colonialism lived on after the independences. Sarah Jilani takes a closer look at the works of Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé. The Malian director's 1982 film Finye (the Bambara word for wind) considers students as the winds of change, whilst Sembène's Mandabi, made in 1968, takes its title from a Wolof word deriving from the French for a postal money order – le mandat postale. Adapting his own novel about the frustrations of bureaucr...
Apr 25, 2022•14 min
In 1821, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater paved the way for drug memoirs, but how do contemporary novelists help us see the global opium trade in a different way? Fariha Shaikh's essay looks at the novel An Insular Possession published in 1986 by Timothy Mo, and at Amitav Ghosh's trilogy which began in 2008 with Sea of Poppies. She also quotes from her researches into The Calcutta Review, Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country and the book Tea and Coffee written by the campaigni...
Apr 25, 2022•13 min
What made him great? Celebrated as a military leader, Alexander took over an empire created by the Persians. Julia Hartley's essay looks at two examples of myth making about Alexander: The Persian Boy, a 1972 historical novel by the English writer Mary Renault and the Shānāmeh or ‘Book of Kings’, an epic written by the medieval Persian poet Abdolghassem Ferdowsi. Julia Hartley lectures at King's College London. She was selected in 2021 as a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3...
Apr 25, 2022•13 min
Sculptures like mouldy fruit, sea creatures that look like oil, blocks of ice carved from a melting glacier and transported to a gallery, reforesting a disused quarry: Vid Simoniti looks at different examples of environmental art and asks whether they create empathy with nature and inspire behaviour change or do we really need pictures of loft insulation and ground source heat pumps displayed on gallery walls? Vid Simoniti lectures at the University of Liverpool. He hosted a series of podcasts A...
Apr 25, 2022•14 min
