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Front Row: Nancy Meyers, Jenny Erpenbeck, Literary modern classics, Turner Prize show

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25/09/2017

Nancy Meyers, Jenny Erpenbeck, Literary modern classics, Turner Prize show

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Nancy Meyers, Jenny Erpenbeck, Literary modern classics, Turner Prize show

Romcom director and writer Nancy Meyers, and what makes a literary modern classic.

Romcom director and writer Nancy Meyers; Jenny Erpenbeck on her new novel Go, Went, Gone; what makes a literary modern classic; the 2017 Turner Prize exhibition in Hull.

Nancy Meyers has made her career making hugely popular romantic comedies such as The Holiday, It's Complicated and What Women Want. As her latest venture, Home Again, comes to cinemas we speak to Nancy Meyers about the rom-com and her career in Hollywood. 

Last week, UK book publishers Bloomsbury launched their first 'Modern Classics' series, joining the likes of Picador, Faber & Faber and of course Penguin, who established their iconic series way back in 1961. But why are certain books deemed worthy of the label? And what exactly does the term mean in the first place? The curator of Bloomsbury's new series, Alison Hennessey, and literary critic Suzi Feay discuss what makes a modern classic.

The migration crisis was seen as a key factor in Germany's election results this weekend with the nationalist AfD party winning enough parliamentary seats to become the third-largest party in the Bundestag. Award-winning novelist Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Germany and she discusses her latest novel - Go, Went, Gone - which explores the crisis from the perspective of a recently-retired German professor based in East Berlin, who discovers that the transitions in his own life connect him in ways he had never imagined to the thousands seeking new lives in Germany.

With the Turner Prize scrapping its eligibility age limit of 50, the work of the four artists who've made the shortlist - two of whom are over 50 - goes on display this week. Critic Jonathan Jones casts an eye over the Turner Prize exhibition which this year takes place at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull for the first time. 

Presenter Kirsty Lang
Producer Jerome Weatherald.

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