Border Crossing

Original version

BBC Radio 4 LW

BBC Radio 4 FM

Amir El-Masry

Sara Markland

Maaza Mengiste

Helen Dunmore

Border Crossing: A Good Soldier & Handsome Daddy

A Good Soldier & Handsome Daddy

BBC Radio 4 - Border Crossing, A Good Soldier & Handsome Daddy

A fictional dialogue between Ethiopia and Britain by Maaza Mengiste and Helen Dunmore.

A unique fictional dialogue between Ethiopia and Britain. A Good Soldier by Maaza Mengiste, read by Amir El Masry, and Handsome Daddy by Helen Dunmore, read by Sara Markland.

A series of programmes that sets up a unique pairing between writers from countries challenged by refugee and migration issues with short story writers from Britain. Each foreign story was given to a British writer who wrote their own response, in an exchange of fiction that aims to explode myths, explore shared concerns and extend the boundaries of the short story. 

In A Good Soldier by Maaza Mengiste, the brutality of the past pursues an Ethiopian father into exile and shockingly marks his relationship with his young son. The reader is Amir El Masry.

In Helen Dunmore’s response, Handsome Daddy, an alert dinner lady notices worrying signs of abuse as a young boy lines up in the lunch queue. The reader is Sara Markland.

Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American novelist, essayist and photographer whose debut novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze was one of The Guardian’s ten best contemporary African books. Helen Dunmore is a prize-winning British novelist, short-story writer and poet whose latest novel, Exposure, was published in January.


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Short story series that sets up unique pairings between foreign and British writers.

Short story series that sets up unique pairings between writers from countries challenged by refugee and migration issues with short story writers from Britain.

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