Meet the Writers
Episodes
Elif Shafak
11 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Best-selling author Elif Shafak is the most widely read female author in Turkey and her work has been translated into a staggering 57 languages. Her 2...
John Brown, Australian politician
04 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Australian politician who popularised koalas in the 1980s and created the “throw another shrimp on the barbie” tourism ad joins Georgina Godwi...
Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For years, author and satirist Gabby Hutchinson Crouch has scoured the week’s news for material to use on the programmes in BBC Radio 4’s Friday-n...
Juan M Lavista Ferres on AI for Good
21 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Microsoft’s pioneering AI For Good Lab, data scientists and researchers’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) is helping to tackle disinformatio...
Tiffany Murray’s rock’n’roll childhood
14 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wondered what David Bowie liked to eat for dinner, or how the members of Queen wrote and rehearsed their famous “Galileos”? Tiffany Murray’...
Christopher Isherwood, ‘Inside Out’, with Katherine Bucknell
07 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The twentieth-century author Christopher Isherwood, made famous by his 1930s work in Berlin, approached his writing about queerness, politics and reli...
UK general election special with Alun Evans
30 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The 2024 UK general election is just days away. Speaking to Georgina Godwin is an expert on many aspects of UK government and politics, in particular,...
Anders Lustgarten
23 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest is perhaps the only playwright and novelist to have been an international athlete, teacher of those on death row at San Quentin prison...
Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 winner
16 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Taking home this year’s prize is US writer and journalist V V Ganeshananthan for her second novel, ‘Brotherless Night’, which took her almost tw...
Sasha Salzmann
09 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Berlin-based author and playwright was born in the then-USSR and emigrated to Germany in 1995. ‘Glorious People’, their second novel, now tran...
Kaliane Bradley
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The British-Cambodian writer and editor initially wrote ‘The Ministry of Time’ – her gripping sci-fi rom-com debut – as a joke for a handful o...
International Booker Prize 2024 winner
26 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Announced this week is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. The recipient of this year’s award is ‘Kairos’ by German writer Jenny ...
Andrew O’Hagan
19 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Award-winning Scottish author and editor at large at the ‘London Review of Books’, Andrew O’Hagan has spent the past decade working on his state...
AK Blakemore
12 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘For me, beauty and disgust don’t really exist in binary.’ AK Blakemore’s discovery of tales of The Great Tarare, a French showman with an ins...
Avi Shlaim
05 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“We left Iraq as Jews, and we arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” Acclaimed historian Avi Shlaim is a man with a complicated backstory as an Arab Jew. H...
‘The Great American Novels’, according to ‘The Atlantic’
28 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1868 writer John William DeForest introduced the idea of the ‘great American novel’ – a work that succeeded in ‘the task of painting the Am...
Zeinab Badawi
21 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“Education for girls is the family business”, says Sudanese-British broadcast journalist Zeinab Badawi. She tells us about her family, career and ...
Christos Tsiolkas
14 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Melbourne-based author talks about how his life has changed since his multi-award-winning 2008 novel ‘The Slap’ made him one of Australia’s ...
Viet Thanh Nguyen
07 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is the near-universal game of “cowboys and Indians” just positive propaganda for genocide? When a Vietnamese-American watches ‘Apocalypse Now’...
Tom Baragwanath
31 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Author Tom Baragwanath hails from New Zealand and lives in France. He grew up in the remote farming community of Wainuioru, separated from Wellington ...
Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka
24 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nairobi-based nonprofit Book Bunk, the brainchild of Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka, restores existing public libraries and installs new librarie...
Helen Russell
17 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
UK author and journalist Helen Russell left her job in London as editor of Marie Clare and relocated to Jutland, Denmark, with her husband in 2013. Wh...
Denise Dorrance
10 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
US cartoonist and illustrator, Denise Dorrance’s sharp, satirical work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers such as the ‘The Spectator’...
Jane Cholmeley
03 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Cholmeley co-founded and opened the feminist Silver Moon Bookshop in London during the Thatcher era to promote the work of female authors. It qui...
Tabitha Lasley
25 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It was the end of a relationship in London that led Tabitha Lasley to pack her bags, leave her journalism job and move to Aberdeen, Scotland, to pursu...
Michael Cunningham
18 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
American novelist and screenwriter Michael Cunningham is best known for his 1998 novel ‘The Hours’, which became a ‘New York Times’ bestseller...