Dogs

New York best-selling author of "Inside of a Dog" Alexandra Horowitz gives us the dog's eye view of life, alongside sports broadcaster and dog owner Andrew Cotter, poet Dr Jason Allen-Paisant and literary expert Dr Joseph Anderton. The conversation chaired by Rana Mitter (not yet a dog owner), covers the lockdown fame of labradors Olive and Mabel, canine narrators in fiction, and the legal status of dogs. Whilst Jason Allen-Paisant's poetry collection Thinking with Trees questions the assumptions dog owners make about their place in the landscape.

Andrew Cotter has published Olive, Mabel and Me, and Dog Days: A Year with Olive and Mabel. https://www.oliveandmabelbook.com

Alexandra Horowtiz has published Inside of a Dog, Being a Dog, and Our Dogs Ourselves. https://alexandrahorowitz.net/

Dr Joseph Anderton teaches at Birmingham City University and has written Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust. His current project is a book called Writing Homelessness: Rough Sleeping in Contemporary British Fiction.

Dr Jason Allen-Paisant lectures at the University of Leeds and, in addition to his poetry collection Thinking with Trees, he is working on a book called Thinking with Spirits: Engaging Art and the Political through Aimé Césaire.

You might be interested in a previous Free Thinking discussion Should we keep pets hearing from John Bradshaw, Jessica Pierce, Laura Purcell and Philip Howell. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09hzj3y

Producer: Ruth Thomson