While the literary establishment speculates on the outcome of this year's
Booker Prize competition, Ian Hamilton visits two winners of a less well-known literary prize - the Koestler Awards. Arthur Koestler originated these awards to encourage prisoners in many forms of creative work. Bookmark talks to a young prison poet out on parole in Southampton, and a long-term prisoner writing crime novels in a Scottish jail. The Bookmark profile features an extraordinary book, The Periodic Table, and its remarkable author,
Primo Levi , who lives in Turin. For most of his life he has been a chemist. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and in The Periodic Table the chemical elements of his science become metaphors for the elements of his life.
Tonight's film shows Levi in his native Turin, recalling crucial segments of his book and life. A survivor of the death camps, he begins with carbon, the life-force. Producer ROGER THOMPSON
Executive producer NIGEL Williams