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Woman's Hour: Margaret Atwood, Harriet Harman MP, Joanna Scanlan, Sportswomen's urinary incontinence

23/02/2022

Margaret Atwood, Harriet Harman MP, Joanna Scanlan, Sportswomen's urinary incontinence

BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour, Margaret Atwood, Harriet Harman MP, Joanna Scanlan, Sportswomen's urinary incontinence

The Canadian bestselling author on feminism, grief and being in your 80s.

Margaret Atwood's latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, gathers together her essays and other occasional non-fiction pieces from 2004 to 2021.  She is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin which won the Booker prize in 2000.  Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was also a Booker Prize winner (with Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other).  Margaret joins Emma to talk about culture wars, free speech, feminism, grief and being in your 80’s.

The Labour MP Harriet Harman has called for a full investigation into how a housing association failed to realise that a female tenant had apparently been left dead in her south London flat for more than two years.  Harriet joins Emma to talk about this happening in her constituency, and also how she has been coping since the sudden death of her husband Jack Dromey last month.

"There was urine flying through the air" - a new report out today in the Telegraph lays bare what it calls the ‘incontinence crisis’ blighting elite women's sport. Female athletes are overwhelmingly at risk of pelvic-floor dysfunction, leading to urinary incontinence which has, according to this report, become normalised in certain sports. Anna Kessel, Women’s Sport Editor at The Telegraph, joins Emma.

The actress and writer Joanna Scanlan is known for her many roles in TV shows such as Getting On,  No Offence and The Thick of It.  She’s just been nominated for a BAFTA leading actress award for the film After Love.  Set in Dover, she plays a white English woman called Mary Hussain who converted to Islam at marriage, but following the unexpected death of her husband many years later uncovers a secret about him across the channel in Calais.

Image: Margaret Atwood
Credit: Luis Mora

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