Free Thinking

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Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with artists and thinkers in debates and interviews.

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

Free Thinking: Romanian History and Literature

Romanian History and Literature

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Romanian History and Literature

Novelists Mircea Cărtărescu and Georgina Harding and historian Philippe Sands on Romania.

In a conversation organised in partnership with Romania Rocks Literature Festival and the Royal Society of Literature, Anne McElvoy finds out how history has fed into fiction.

The Fall of Ceaușescu in 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. How did the experience of living through that make its way into fiction? Georgina Harding published In Another Europe: A Journey To Romania in 1990 and followed that with a novel The Painter of Silence, set in Romania of the 1950s.  Mircea Cărtărescu was born in 1956 and has published novels, poems and essays. In the novel Nostalgia published in 1989, he looks at communist Bucharest in the 80s, in a dreamlike narrative seen in part through the eyes of children and young adults.  Philippe Sands has chronicled Jewish histories in Eastern Europe in his books and podcast series The Ratline. He recommends Mihail Sebastian's book For Two Thousand Years. 

Producer: Ruth Watts 

Image: Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu

You can find a playlist called Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking website, which contains other conversations organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

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