Stacy Keach reads Shirley Jackson's celebrated story, The Lottery, first published in the New Yorker in 1948. The inhabitants of a small farming community in Vermont gather each year for what we begin to realise is a
frightening local lottery.

American author Shirley Jackson's work has been described as the 'literature of psychological suspense'. Writing from the 1940s into the 1960s, her style of 'creeping unease' was hugely popular, initially with readers of magazines such as Collier's, Good Housekeeping, Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Woman's Home Companion.

After Jackson's early death in 1965, at the age of 48, her story collections began a marked revival of interest in her work. In recent years she has received increasing attention from literary critics and a new generation of readers. Her deceptively simple, apparently realistic style, often cloaking chilling or darkly hidden agendas, has influenced writers like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King and Nigel Kneale among others.

Director: Martin Jarvis

Producer: Rosalind Ayres
A Jarvis & Ayres production for BBC Radio 4. Show less