Free Thinking

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

BBC Radio 4

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: Sisters

Sisters

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Sisters

The Unthank sisters, Sally Alexander, Lucy Holland, Oyinkan Braithwaite and Shahidha Bari.

From the sisterhood to the harmonising voices of sisters who sing via fairy stories and historic tales. Shahidha Bari and guests explore what it means to be a sister.

The Unthank sisters, writers Lucy Holland and Oyinkan Braithwaite and historian and feminist activist Sally Alexander join Shahidha Bari for a conversation about what it means to be a sister on International Women's Day 2022.  You could make a family from recent novels depicting sisterhood from Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister the Serial Killer, to Daisy Johnson's Sisters and Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half but literary sisterhood goes back via Jane Austen and the Brontës to Chekhov, King Lear's daughters, Cinderella and Greek myths about the seven sisters who formed the Pleiades, or Antigone and Ismene.  And if you're looking at feminist history the idea of the sisterhood has been a cornerstone of political action. Is it right that sisters will have a particular bond and sound if they perform music together?  All of this and more in tonight's Free Thinking conversation.

The Unthank sisters will be on tour with their latest album Sorrows Away visiting a range of venues from Norwich, Poole, Northampton, Middlesborough, Belfast, Edinburgh, Dublin and a range of places in between starting on March 13th in Lincoln
Lucy Holland has written Sistersong set in Anglo-Saxon Britannia. She also presents Breaking the Glass Slipper, a podcast celebrating women in genre. 
You can hear a reading of Oyinkan's novel My Sister the Serial Killer by Weruche Opia on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p08q6q19 
Sally Alexander, Professor Emerita at Goldsmiths, is founding editor of the History Workshop Journal and is working on a history of psycho-analysis.

Producer: Kevin Core 

Image: The Unthank sisters, credit: Sarah Mason

You might also be interested in the most recent episode of Radio 3's Words and Music on Sisters, with its curated playlist of readings and music of all kinds ranging from Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Brit Bennet and Arifa Akbar to Fanny Mendelssohn, Errollyn Wallen, Hildegard of Bingen and the Labeque Sisters performing Ravel.
And tomorrow's programme explores new research into women's history.  And there's a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website called Women in the World 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Free Thinking

Sisters

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3