Free Thinking18 Okt 2018

Francis Fukuyama, Olga Tokarczuk, Alev Scott, Michael Talbot.

What's it like to be banned from your own country or to have your writing spark a row? Rana Mitter's guests talk identity, borders, forest landscapes and the long impact of the Ottoman empire. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama is associated with the phrase "the end of history". His latest book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment looks at what he sees as the threats to Liberalism.

Alev Scott has travelled through 12 countries, talking to figures including warlords and refugees for her book Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire but she can't return to her birthplace. She's joined by New Generation Thinker Michael Talbot who teaches at the University of Greenwich and whose research has uncovered the drunken antics of soldiers in post World War I Istanbul. He's a contributor to http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/ and he reviews Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan -published now in an English translation by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely. It's the first book in the Ottoman Quartet, a narrative that spans the history of Turkey during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The writer is now in prison for life.

The Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights. Her latest novel to be translated into English by Antonia Lloyd Jones is called Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead and became the film Spoor directed by directed by Agnieszka Holland. Her writing has been called anti-Catholic.

You can find more discussions about borders, home and belonging in this playlist of programmes https://bbc.in/2QALzkL

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Episoder(1526)

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