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Front Row: The office in culture, Kate Clanchy, publishers' Super Thursday

03/09/2020

The office in culture, Kate Clanchy, publishers' Super Thursday

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, The office in culture, Kate Clanchy, publishers' Super Thursday

The history of the office in culture; Kate Clanchy on her book How to Grow Your Own Poem.

While some return to the office, many are not - we discuss the history of the office in culture; Orwell Prize-winning writer Kate Clanchy on her new book How to Grow Your Own Poem.

As major City firms and the likes of Facebook and Google allow their employees to work from home for the foreseeable future, does it herald the end of the office as we know it? And what does it mean for culture? From Working Girl to The Office, The Bell Jar to Joshua Ferris’s  Then We Came To An End, the office has provided rich inspiration for the arts. We discuss the history of the office in culture and contemplate what comes next with writer Jonathan Lee and film and TV critic Hannah McGill.

The Orwell Prize-winning writer and teacher Kate Clanchy has spent years with young people helping them to become poets.  Some of her students are from migrant or refugee families and have brought with them rich poetic traditions; some from home backgrounds that haven’t traditionally seen poetry as a world open to them.  Now she has written a book, How to Grow Your Own Poem, which details the way that she uses existing poems and her students’ lived experience to teach – a method that she believes anyone can follow to write their own poem.

The start of September would always be a busy time for new books, jostling for attention in the run up to the lucrative Christmas buying period. But lockdown saw many publishers freeze releases from March onwards.  And today the floodgates were opened meaning the launch of an unprecedented 590 hardbacks, 28% up on last year. To explore what this means for writers, publishers and consumers Samira is joined by Thea Lenarduzzi, commissioning editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and Kit Caless co-founder and editor at independent publisher Influx Press.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed 
Studio producer: Hilary Dunn

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