21 May 2005
Saturday 21 May 2005 21:15-22:00 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan talks to the acclaimed author Barry Hines, author of A Kestrel for a Knave (later filmed as Kes), about his four decade career as novelist, playwright and screen writer.
There's also be a chance to hear another instalment from the Verb's very own eartoonist, Peter Blegvad, and the award-winning travel writer Alexander Frater traces the evolution of travel writing over the past century.
Programme Details
The Verb May 20th 2005 Tx 21.05.05
On the programme this week, travel writing with a difference. KATHLEEN JAMIE is one of contemporary poetry's brightest stars, and possesses a pair of its sharpest eyes. She has travelled widely and wildly - an account of her experiences in northern Pakistan Among Muslims has just been reprinted - but her latest book, Findings , finds her confined to her native Scotland. "For a variety of reasons," she tells IAN McMILLAN, "I couldn't travel, so I was forced to look around me." The result is a series of accounts of expeditions fitted into or around her daily life, all of which are deeply, searchingly engaged with the land and wildlife of Scotland.
Kathleen reads from the book, in which Birds figure especially. She records her encounters with peregrines, ospreys and a corncrake, "like an elegant ceramic water jug suddenly come to life", and tells of various quests: for real, Orcadian darkness, for signs of the 'Shielings' - an old hill festival, based the high pastures where shepherds once moved their animals for summer grazing. Findings has all the distinguishing features of travel literature - the encounters with place and people, the observation and description - but instead of travelling further, as Jamie says, it attempts to go deeper. Findings and Among Muslims are published by Sort Of Books
ALEXANDER FRATER's writing life has been based on going further. A former travel editor of The Observer, he has written books about chasing the monsoon through India; tracing the route of the old Imperial Airways planes and flying boats, which used to link Croydon and Vanautu, and travelling in the tropics. The latter was inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss's 'Tristes Tropiques' so The Verb asked Alexander Frater to talk about the line of travel writing, from its roots in anthropology and the grand tour, to the late twentieth century explosion triggered by Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. Frater has some trenchant things to say about the state of the genre now (only one in ten of the hundred books he read as a judge for the Thomas Cook travel award deserved publication, he says) and he talks about the research and dilemmas of a travel writer. Travels in the Torrid Zone, and Alexander Fraters other books, are all in paperback with Picador.
BARRY HINES is one of the last of the great Northern working class writers, a stream that includes David Storey, John Braine and Stan Barstow. Famous for Kes , he also wrote The Gamekeeper , a novel of rural life clashing with the council estates of a small northern town; Threads, a film about a nuclear disaster in South Yorkshire, Looks and Smiles , a look at a generation on the slag heap of the 1980's unemployment, and The Price of Coal , an initially comic but ultimately tragic book about a visit by the Prince of Wales to a colliery, and a pit disaster. The last two have just been reprinted by Pomona Books. The Verb took Barry back to the street he was born in, in Hoyland Common in South Yorkshire.
SOPHIE WOOLLEY is a writer and performer of rare and formidable talent. On her third visit to The Verb, she performs a monologue "Brief Word Encounter " in several voices, one of which is Celia Johnson's, from the film Brief Encounter. Why? Well, you really have to hear the piece (Click on 'Listen to the Last Programme Again' on our main page.). It may well change the way you travel on trains. Sophie Woolley's work can be found in New Writing 12 (Picador) and she is about to start a play writing residency at the Soho theatre.
PETER BLEGVAD, the programme's audio-cartoonist, tackles the second in his series of elemental eartoons, and threatens to permanently alter the way you look at and think about, if not drink, a glass of water. Blake told us to see a world in a grain of sand. Blegvad pours an entire sonic universe out of a tumbler of water. Peter Blegvad will be starring at The Verb's Hay Festival programme, which will be recorded in front of an audience at 4pm in St Mary's Church, Hay on Wye, on Friday June 3rd. If you would like to join us, contact the Hay Festival box office to reserve your free place. 0870 990 1299
