Gilly Smith
speaker
1,281 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Gilly Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
You said that you didn't cook as a young woman.
You were a feminist, and cooking was a repetitive labor.
Simone de Beauvoir very famously talked about that.
I speak to a lot of women who carry the food of their heritage, of their homeland, with them as refugees.
Often,
not necessarily as refugees, when they come to university as well, when they suddenly feel that yearning and they phone their mother or their grandmother and they say, oh, can you just give me that recipe for the soup that you used to make for me when I was ill?
And food becomes something else then.
You talk a lot about that and that has really informed the way that you write.
It's about what food is when you leave it in the homeland.
Now,
Obviously, Lebanon is a tiny, tiny country, half the size of Wales, as you say in your introduction.
Lots of people have left it.
But Lebanese food is probably one of the most famous foods, certainly in Britain.
How important can you see that the cooking now is?
It's not that repetitive labor.
It's actually transcendent as such.
Simone de Beauvoir would call it.
It is a creative act and a hugely important political act.
Tell me how that has changed in the time that you have been capturing it in all your books.
Yeah, I was talking to a Lebanese woman yesterday who runs the Network of International Women in Brighton and Hove, where I live.
Showing 21–40 of 1,281 · page 2 of 65
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