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Front Row: Shadow and Bone, Lemn Sissay, Gwendoline Riley

27/04/2021

Shadow and Bone, Lemn Sissay, Gwendoline Riley

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Shadow and Bone, Lemn Sissay, Gwendoline Riley

Netflix series Shadow and Bone reviewed, Lemn Sissay's Brighton Festival, Gwendoline Riley

Netflix series Shadow and Bone reviewed, Lemn Sissay's Brighton Festival, Gwendoline Riley's new novel My Phantoms and the Flanders and Swann fanatic who just won BBC Mastermind.

We review new Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone. It's being touted as the new Game of Thrones but is it worth the hype? Children's and YA author Katherine Webber Tsang gives her verdict.

This weekend the Brighton Festival opens and will be the first UK city festival since lockdown. Last year the guest director Lemn Sissay was ready to launch the festival when Lockdown restrictions meant the whole thing had to be cancelled. This year, he’s back as guest director again with a festival themed around Care – a personal theme to Lemn who spent his childhood in care, but also one that’s acquired unique resonance over the past year – and with over 94 separate events, installations, and performances across a mixture of outdoor, indoor and online platforms.

Plus novelist Gwendoline Riley, who tells us about the process of writing her new novel My Phantoms about a mother and daughter's doomed attempts to communicate with oneanother.

And last night, 24-year-old Jonathan Gibson became the youngest ever Mastermind champion, winning with his incomparable knowledge of the songs of Flanders and Swann. He shares his passion for this pioneering comic duo, and tells us why their music deserves to be better known.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang
Producer: Simon Richardson

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