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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Open Book

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics

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Open Book: Jackie Kay on her new collection of short stories Reality, Reality

13/05/2012

Jackie Kay on her new collection of short stories Reality, Reality

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Jackie Kay on her new collection of short stories Reality, Reality

Jackie Kay on her new collection of short stories, Reality, Reality.

News from the book world with Mariella Frostrup. Jackie Kay discusses her new short story collection Reality, Reality, and why novels set in the 50s are in the literary zeitgeist.

Mariella Frostrup talks to awarding winning poet and novelist Jackie Kay about her new collection of short stories Reality, Reality. Her previous work includes Trumpet, the novel which won her the Guardian First Book Award. In this collection fourteen of the fifteen stories are told by first person female narrators and show a variety of female predicaments - from the apparently trivial world of a compulsive dieter to the deeply serious plight of a woman suffering abuse in a care home, explored with compassion, wit and insight. 

Why are novels set in the fifties currently so popular and what does interest in such books reveal about our own age? As we become firmly entrenched in a period of austerity does life as it was lived over 60 years ago offer comfort, was it the last age of innocence, or does it provide a means to reflect on our own time? Crime writer Laura Wilson whose book A Willing Victim is the most recent in her series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Ted Stratton and is set in 1956, the year of Suez and the Hungarian uprising joins writer and broadcaster James Runcie whose Grantchester Mystery series featuring Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death starts in the 1953, the year of the Coronation, to discuss why the 50s is the literary decade of the moment.

And Tim Coates talks about his new website bilbary.com which aims to increase the capacity of libraries to provide e-books for their customers, in the week that the Carnegie Trust UK produced a report urging libraries to adapt to a changing world.


Producer: Hilary Dunn.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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Jackie Kay on her new collection of short stories Reality, Reality

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