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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Writer's Dickens

The Essay: The Writer's Dickens: Episode 2: Romesh Gunesekera - The Orphan Eye

The Writer's Dickens

Episode 2

Episode 2: Romesh Gunesekera - The Orphan Eye

Romesh Gunesekera - The Orphan Eye

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Romesh Gunesekera on how Dickens addresses the move from childhood into the world beyond.

Using David Copperfield as a starting point, novelist Romesh Gunesekera explores how Charles Dickens writes about the move from childhood into the world beyond.

Five contemporary novelists examine the craft of Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Taking as their starting point a favourite extract from one of Dickens's novels, each writer discuss Dickens's themes, narrative techniques and writing craft, and tells us what they themselves have learnt from it. They offer thoughtful, unusually engaged and focused critical appreciation of Dickens's skill, as well as valuable insights into their own work and how they themselves wrestle with the subject and technique under discussion. 

In the second essay in the series, Booker-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera takes an extract from David Copperfield as a starting point for an exploration of Dickens's writing about childhood and the move from childhood into adulthood, a theme which has been significant in his own writing.

First broadcast in December 2011.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Contemporary novelists examine the craft of Charles Dickens's prose

Contemporary novelists examine the craft of Charles Dickens's prose, and reflect on how the giant of British 19th-century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing.

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Episode 2: Romesh Gunesekera - The Orphan Eye

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