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The Cultural Frontline: Who owns history?

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Who owns history?

29/10/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, Who owns history?

Artists telling stories from a contested past

Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, Oscar winning actor Viola Davis and director Gina Prince Bythewood on their film The Woman King, and the late novelist Dame Hilary Mantel

This week we hear how writers and filmmakers navigate the challenges of telling stories from the past, a past that in many places around the world people are finding it harder and harder to agree upon.

Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk tells Anu Anand about his new novel Nights of Plague, set on the fictional Aegean island of Mingheria. It’s 1900 and the island is in the grip of plague. The novel explores themes of religion, superstition, individuality & nationalism and has caused some controversy when last year Pamuk was investigated by the Turkish state for “insulting” the founder of modern Turkey because of similarities some drew between a character in Nights of Plague, the revolutionary leader Major Kamil, and Turkey's first president Kemal Attaturk.

Anna Bailey talks to Oscar winning actor Viola Davis and director Gina Prince Bythewood about finding alternative historical sources for their new movie The Woman King, about the women warriors of the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey, which is in modern day Benin.

And we mark the passing of British novelist Dame Hilary Mantel, best known for her historical Wolf Hall trilogy, hearing about how novels can help us question historical orthodoxies.

(Photo: Orhan Pamuk. Credit: Ahmet Bolat/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

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