Episode description

Cultural revolution memories, European resistance in occupied Poland and France and early attempts to establish trade with Mughal leaders in India are the topics explored in prize winning history books. Rana Mitter talks to authors Tania Branigan, Halik Kochanski and Nandini Das about digging in the archives and seeking out interviewees to help shape our understanding of these different periods in world history. Plus prize winning science books by John Vaillant, who considers the incredible power of fire as it consumes a city in Alberta built on the extraction of fossil fuels, and Ed Yong who reveals the extrodinary range of senses which humans don't have, but other animals do, from navigating using smell to the ability to detect electromagnetic waves.

Tania Branigan is the 2023 winner of the Cundill History Prize for Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution Nandini Das is the 2023 winner of the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire Halik Kochanski won the Wolfson History Prize 2023 with her book Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939–1945 John Vaillant won the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for non fiction for his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World Ed Yong was the winner of the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize for An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Producer: Julian Siddle

You can hear more from Nandini Das talking to Rana alongside Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed: An Untold History in a Free Thinking episode called Climate change and empire building You can hear more from Halik Kolchanski in the interviews Rana recorded with all six finalists for the 2023 Wolfson prize