Free Thinking14 Kesä 2022

South African writing

Damon Galgut's novel, The Promise, explores the decline of the white Afrikaner Swart family and their failed promise to their black domestic servant. The family resist giving her, her own house and her own land as South Africa emerges from the era of apartheid. Land also occupies Julia Blackburn in her new book Dreaming the Karoo, which explores traces of the indigenous /Xam people who were driven from their ancestral lands in the 1870s. And, New Generation Thinker Jade Munslow Ong has been looking at the evolution of the farm novel and the ways in which South African literature maps experiences of displacement. They join Anne McElvoy to explore the ways in which writing has charted the personal and political histories of modern South Africa.

Damon Galgut is a is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise. Two of his previous novels were shortlisted in 2003 and 2010, The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room. He has written several plays.

Julia Blackburn has written both fiction and non-fiction, including her memoir The Three of Us and the Orange Prize nominated novels The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions. Her latest book, Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam is published on 16th June 2022.

Dr Jade Munslow Ong is a BBC Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker. lectures in English literature and environmental literature at the University of Salford, specializing in colonial and post-colonial writing and fin de siècle cultures. She has published Olive Schreiner and African Modernism.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(1526)

The Ethics of Knowledge

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledg...

10 Heinä 56min

Trade and Traffic

What does trade set in motion beyond the exchange of goods? Anne McElvoy explores the movement of commerce across time as a carrier of habits, ideas, ambitions and influence, as well as of material th...

3 Heinä 56min

The Child's Eye View

Shahidha Bari investigates the child’s-eye view of the world. From navigating AI to living through war and the joys of reading, what makes children’s perspectives so distinctive? With writer Katherine...

26 Kesä 56min

Eccentrics & Outsiders

How has the figure of the outsider or eccentric been used to explore English culture, history, politics, and our relationship with nature and the countryside? Matthew Sweet discusses, including a re-r...

19 Kesä 56min

Satire and Gulliver's Travels

300 years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Matthew Sweet looks at satire, past and present. How can satirists reflect critically and humorously on political events in an a...

12 Kesä 56min

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Kesä 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Touko 56min

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Touko 56min