Words and Music

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

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Music: Classical

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Audre Lorde's World

Audre Lorde's World

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Audre Lorde's World

Jade Anouka and Lorde’s children read Lorde's work, from her poems to her cancer diaries.

Audre Lorde described herself as 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'.  Her words are set alongside recordings by Chineke!, the Kanneh-Masons, Sarah Vaughan and Miriam Makeba.

Performer Jade Anouka and Lorde’s children Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and Jonathan Rollins read from her inspirational poems, novels and her cancer diaries with music choices ranging from recordings by Chineke! and the Kanneh-Mason family of composers including Florence Price and George Walker, to the singers she listened to including Miriam Makeba, Sarah Vaughan and Donna Summer.  

Lorde's writing was inspired by her wish to confront and address injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.  Brought up a Catholic in New York, she began writing poems as a teenager. In the 1960s she worked as a librarian in New York public schools and became a mother to her two children before divorcing from her husband, who was a white, gay man, in 1970. During her career she held a visiting Professorship at the Free University of Berlin and at various colleges and universities in America, co-founded the first U.S. publisher for women of colour, helped establish Sisterhood in Support of Sisters (SISA) in South Africa to benefit black women who were affected by apartheid and was New York State Poet Laureate. In an African naming ceremony before her death in 1992 at the age of 58 , she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known". 

The journals Audre Lorde kept while undergoing a mastectomy originally published in 1980 are now available again and her1982 novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Essays and poem collections including The Black Unicorn have also been republished in recent years.

You might be interested in this conversation on Free Thinking which features her children, the poet Jackie Kay and performer Selina Thompson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004my0 and you can find other discussions relating to Queer History Month in the Free Thinking Prose and Poetry collection.

Readings include: 
Sister Outsider extracts
Zami A New Spelling of My Name extracts 
A Litany for Survival
Harriet 
On the Night of the Full Moon
A Burst of Light 
1984 
Letter to Mary Daly 
Now That I am Forever with Child 
The Cancer Journals extracts 
Dahomey  

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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