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Episode details

Radio 3,26 May 2015,15 mins

SeriesWhy I Write

Hay Festival: Alex Clark

The Essay

Available for over a year

Literary journalist and writer Alex Clark has written many of our leading publications, and is a former Booker and Granta judge. She comes to Hay to ask 'Why I Write'. In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of an audience at the Hay Festival earlier this week, five writers take George Orwell's title Why I Write as a starting point for their own explorations. The writers include the screenwriter, novelist and author of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, Frank Cottrell-Boyce; the editor and translator Daniel Hahn; Horatio Clare, whose first book was set on the hillsides where he grew up around Hay itself; and the Welsh poet laureate, Gillian Clarke. Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes CD Review, Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and World on 3 all broadcasting from the festival.

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