Barbaric Genius

Available for over a year

Matthew Sweet will be talking to the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson about the theologian, Jean Calvin and what she believes is his profound influence on the great tradition of American literature. Also in the programme, the writer John Healy. After fifteen years of living on the streets of London as an alcoholic, Healy discovered chess in prison, and then wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Grass Arena. As a new documentary, Barbaric Genius, sets out to unravel the tangled story of how that publishing success turned into infamy, John Healy talks to Matthew about his life and his writing.