The Poet Laureate has gone to his Shed

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The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed

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Poet Laureate Simon Armitage talks to guests about life, language and music in his shed.

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage is a former probation officer, DJ and poet celebrated for his witty and profound take on modern life. He writes in the shed in his garden, and in this podcast he invites guests to join him to talk about poetry, creativity, music, art, sheds, sherry and the countryside.

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The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed: JK Rowling

JK Rowling

BBC Radio 4 - The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed, JK Rowling

Simon Armitage talks to JK Rowling in his potting shed about writing & life after Harry.

JK Rowling, best known for writing one of the best selling book series ever - the Harry Potter series - talks to Simon Armitage about creativity, magic and life after Potter.

Joanne Rowling, known as JK Rowling, is known globally for writing one of the best selling book series in history.  Harry Potter and his classmates now have their firm place in the collective imagination of a generation of readers.  She also writes crime fiction under the pen name Robert Galbraith.

In the shed, Jo Rowling discusses the joys and the pains of writing with fellow author Simon Armitage, explaining how she picked up a pen to start again after the huge success of her first series. She discusses myths and the truths that have grown up around the books, including the idea that she conceived the idea for the Harry Potter series while on a delayed train from Manchester to London. 

Jo brings a very special 'show and tell' into the shed when she gives Simon the chance to dip into her very first notebooks, never before shown publicly, which she used to collect early ideas that might end up in a first Potter book, including the names of the pupils in Harry's class. 

The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and relative poverty until the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997. There were six further books in the series, of which the last was released in 2007. Since then, Jo has written several books for adult readers: The Casual Vacancy (2012) and - under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith - the crime-fiction Cormoran Strike series. She has lived a "rags to riches" life in which she progressed from living on benefits to being one of the best- selling writers of all time, giving away much of her earnings to charity. 

Produced by Susan Roberts

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