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Episode details

Radio 4,09 Oct 2017,45 mins

Dawn French, Soprano Amanda Forbes, Writer Valeria Luiselli

Woman's Hour

Available for over a year

Dawn French is best-known as a comedian. But she's also a writer and actor. She's been nominated for seven British Academy Television Awards and won a BAFTA Fellowship with her comedy partner Jennifer Saunders. She talks to Jane about her career, her life and her new book, a biographical diary. Carole Anne Duffy published her anthology of The World's Wife in 1999. Since then many of the poems featured have gone on to be exam set texts and even inspired a play. Now some are being developed into an Opera. Amanda Forbes, the soprano taking the lead role, explains why the work has such wide appeal. Harvey Weinstein has been fired from the independent film company he co-founded and catapulted to Oscar glory, felled by a mushrooming sexual harassment scandal that has hobbled his status as a media mogul and left his future in Hollywood in jeopardy Jane talks to Laura Bates Founder of Everyday Sexism Project about why more of the actors are not coming forward to support those that have spoken out In 2015 Valeria Luiselli, an award-winning Mexican author, began working as a volunteer interpreter in New York City's federal immigration court. Her job was to ask unaccompanied children who had crossed the border from Mexico a standardized series of questions. She would then translate their answers from Spanish into English. Jane asks Luiselli about her career and how her experiences of talking to these immigrant children influenced her latest work, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Presenter Jane Garvey Producer Beverley Purcell.

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