Mary Renault's Greek Myths

Available for over a year

Octavia Bright explores Ancient Greece through the writing of the English author Mary Renault. Born in 1905, Renault worked as a nurse before she began writing romantic fiction, but made her name with historical novels like The Charioteer, The Bull From the Sea, and the Alexander trilogy. The world she created was a cultural golden age and turned myths ridden with drama, cruelty, sex, and death into compelling human stories, Octavia is joined by classicist Bettany Hughes, who has written the introduction for the latest edition of The King Must Die, writer Kamila Shamsie, whose retelling of Antigone, the novel Home Fire, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018, and the academic and novelist Okechukwu Nzelu to discuss the qualities and enduring appeal of her writing. Book List – Sunday 21 August and Thursday 25 August The King Must Die by Mary Renault The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault The Persian Boy by Mary Renault Funeral Games by Mary Renault Purposes of Love by Mary Renault Kind Are Her Answers by Mary Renault The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault Return to Night by Mary Renault North Face by Mary Renault The Charioteer by Mary Renault The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault Lion in the Gateway by Mary Renault The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault The Praise Singer by Mary Renault