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Book of the Week: Edgelands

Book of the Week: Edgelands: Episode 4

Edgelands

Episode 4

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Edgelands, Episode 4

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts look at retail parks and edgeland hotels.

Retail parks and edgeland hotels. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts journey into England's true wilderness. From April 2011.

Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explore a wilderness that is much closer than you think: those debatable zones that are neither town nor countryside. These two lyric poets celebrate the strange beauty of these places that we all journey through, but generally fail to acknowledge.

Recorded entirely on location in the English edgelands, this Book of the Week journeys through the post-industrial landscapes of ruined warehouses, landfill sites, sewage works and power stations. 

Today, retail parks and edgeland hotels. 

Read by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Produced by Emma Harding

Edgelands is published by Jonathan Cape (27th February 2011). It won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction in 2009. 

Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry - including 'Ice Age' - and has received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Michael Symmons Roberts has published five collections of poetry - including 'Corpus', which won the Whitbread Poetry Award - and two novels. He is a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan and their opera, 'The Sacrifice' won the RPS Award.

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Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explore places that are neither town nor country

Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explore the strange beauty of the 'edgelands', debatable zones that are neither town nor country

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