Free Thinking21 Okt 2015

Free Thinking - Home. Marilynne Robinson. Edwin Heathcote. Thomas Harding. Imtiaz Dharker

Marilynne Robinson, Thomas Harding, Imtiaz Dharker discuss ideas of home with Philip Dodd. Are we becoming increasingly rootless, or simply finding new ways to put down roots.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson is the author of a novel called Home and finds her own roots in Iowa and in her Calvinist faith. In her new collection of essays The Givenness of Things, she explores the ideas that make up the religious and philosophical homeland of Europe and America – Calvinism, Humanism, the Reformation, the self.

Thomas Harding’s family originate in Germany. In his new book The House by the Lake he relates the changing ownership and fortunes of his family’s summer house in eastern Berlin and with it the history of Germany from the thirties up to the present. It's his follow up to his best-selling book Hanns and Rudolph.

Poet and artist Imtiaz Dharker describes herself as a "Pakistani Calvinist Scottish Muslim" and her life has taken her from Lahore, to Glasgow, to Bombay, to Wales and finally to London – "I think displacement is often a good and useful thing for a writer", she says.

And as a new exhibition dedicated to The World of Charles and Ray Eames opens, Edwin Heathcote takes Philip on an imaginative tour of their iconic house, Case Study House #8, which they designed to "express man's life in the modern world."

The World of Charles and Ray Eames runs at the Barbican in London from 21st October to 14th February. Marilynne Robinson's Essay collection The Givenness of Things is out now. Thomas Harding's book is called The House by the Lake Imtiaz Dharker's most recent poetry collection is called Over The Moon.

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