14 January 2006
Saturday 14 January 2006 22:00-22:45 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan presents the weekly magazine about language.
Programme Details
Start the new year of The Verb with Ian McMillan and guests as they contemplate the role of objects in literature. Henry James constructed a novel out of a golden bowl and John Keats paid homage to a Grecian Urn. But for the historian and critic Sukhdev Sandhu, an object much closer to home is his inspiration for a new Verb commission on memory, read by the great actor James Bolam - he of Beiderbecke Trilogy and Likely Lads fame.
Also on the programme, the Whitbread prize winning first novelist Tash Aw, gives his Verb guide to great writers of South East Asia. Starting with the Nobel prize nominee from Indonesia, Pramoedya, who could only get his novels printed in the outside world by telling them to the visitors to his prison.
England's greatest living poet Geoffrey Hill talks to Ian McMillan about the function of poetry and his new collection Without Title.
And the electrifying dub poet Michelle Scally Clarke, shows the true meaning of her middle name when she performs a new years resolution and an ode to her home town of Leeds.
Don't miss The Verb at 10pm here on BBC Radio 3.
Producer: Ariane Koek
Additional Information:
1) Without Title by Geoffrey Hill is published by Penguin
2) The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw is published by Harper Perennial
3) Michelle Scally Clarke's two poetry collections I am and She Is are published by Route
4) The Girl From The Coast by Pramoedya Ananta Toer is published by Hyperion and is available by special order
5) London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City by Sukhdev Sandhu is published by Harper Collins
