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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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Mariella Frostrup

Mary Lawson

Ali May

Amir Cheheltan

Andrea Kidd

Open Book: Mary Lawson; Iranian literature; AS Byatt and Cecil Day Lewis

16/03/2014

Mary Lawson; Iranian literature; AS Byatt and Cecil Day Lewis

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Mary Lawson; Iranian literature; AS Byatt and Cecil Day Lewis

Acclaimed Canadian author Mary Lawson discusses her latest novel Road Ends.

Mary Lawson on her latest novel Road Ends; Amir Cheheltan and Ali May discuss modern Iranian literature; 50 years on, the correspondence between AS Byatt and Cecil Day Lewis.

Acclaimed Canadian author Mary Lawson talks to Mariella Frostrup about her latest novel Road Ends, set once again in the harsh and isolated landscape of Northern Ontario, where a suicide has an unexpected effect on an already unravelling family.

35 years ago Iran was declared an Islamic Republic following the exile of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. Known as Persia before 1935, it had one of the greatest empires of the ancient world, and has maintained a distinct cultural identity within the Islamic world especially retaining its own language, Farsi. Writer and broadcaster Ali May and one of the country's most important contemporary writers Amir Cheheltan discuss the state of modern Iranian literature

In the early 1960s an aspiring young writer sent her manuscript on spec to the publisher Chatto and Windus. The author was AS Byatt, her editor Cecil Day Lewis, and that debut novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was published, after much editorial discussion between the two, 50 years ago in 1964. This early correspondence offers an unique window into the writing process and highlights the blossoming relationship between these two giants of the literary world.

Producer: Andrea Kidd.

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