Free Thinking

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The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Free Thinking: Octavia Butler's Kindred

Octavia Butler's Kindred

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Octavia Butler's Kindred

A novel from 1979 which uses time travel to explore race, slavery and trauma.

Gerry Canavan, Nisi Shawl and Irenosen Okojie join Shahidha Bari to discuss Octavia Butler, the American who became the first science-fiction writer to gain a MacArthur Fellowship.

"A hermit in the middle of Los Angeles" is one way she described herself - born in 1947, Butler became a writer who wanted to "tell stories filled with facts. Make people touch and taste and know." Since her death in 2006, her writing has been widely taken up and praised for its foresight in suggesting developments such as big pharma and for its critique of American history.  Shahidha Bari is joined by the author Irenosen Okojie and the scholar Gerry Canavan and Nisi Shawl, writer, editor, journalist – and long time friend of Octavia Butler.

Irenosen Okojie's latest collection of short stories is called Nudibranch and she was winner of the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for Fiction for her story Grace Jones. You can hear her discussing her own writing life alongside Nadifa Mohamed in a previous Free Thinking episode https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000k8sz
Gerry Canavan is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction.
Nisi Shawl writes about books for The Seattle Times, and also contributes frequently to Ms. Magazine, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, The Washington Post.
 

Producer: Luke Mulhall 

You might be interested in the Free Thinking episode Science fiction and ecological thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000h6yw 
and on Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b6yb37
and a playlist exploring Landmarks of Culture including Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and the writing of Audre Lorde, and of Wole Soyinka
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

Image: Octavia Butler
Credit: Malcolm Ali/WireImage/Getty Images

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