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Front Row: Scott Z Burns, writer and director of The Report, poet Katrina Porteous and the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting winner

Scott Z Burns, writer and director of The Report, poet Katrina Porteous and the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting winner

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Scott Z Burns, writer and director of The Report, poet Katrina Porteous and the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting winner

Scott Z Burns on his docudrama The Report, exploring corruption and subversion in the CIA

Director Scott Z Burns on his docudrama, The Report, probing the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, created after 9/11. The CIA destroyed evidence to hide a brutal secret.

New Amazon Original docudrama The Report sees an idealistic Washington staffer played by Adam Driver tasked by his senator boss to lead an investigation of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which was created in the aftermath of 9/11. His relentless pursuit of the truth leads to explosive findings that uncover the lengths to which the nation’s top intelligence agency went to destroy evidence, subvert the law, and hide a brutal secret from the American public. Kirsty Lang talks to The Report’s writer and director Scott Z Burns.

Anyone over 16 can enter an unperformed play to the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, have it judged by theatre experts, with the possibility of winning part of the £40,000 prize fund and a chance of working with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester towards its production. This year there were 2,561 entries, whittled down to a shortlist of 15. Today the winner will be announced and Kirsty Lang will talk to that lucky that playwright and one of the judges, also a previous winner, Anna Jordan.  

In her poems Katrina Porteous has explored nature, place and time through the local, writing about the coast of Northumberland and its fishing communities, often in their dialect. But in the past few years she has been inspired by the work of research scientists, space telescopes and the Large Hadron Collider. In her new collection, Edge, she concerns extend beyond the human scale. She writes about the tiny - sub atomic particles - and the vast, the moons of Saturn and the workings of the sun. Katrina Porteous talks to Kirsty Lang about  how, with no background in science approach particle physics and cosmology, she writes poems about them, poems that the general reader can understand.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Producer: Julian May

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Scott Z Burns, writer and director of The Report, poet Katrina Porteous and the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting winner

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