Imagined Worlds

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BBC Radio 4 - Imagined Worlds

Booker chair Neil MacGregor reflects on fiction writers' responses to our turbulent times.

Neil MacGregor, the chair of this year's Booker prize jury, discusses the way fiction writers have responded to the extraordinary events in which they have been working.

The Chair of this year's Booker Prize jury, Neil MacGregor, explores what this year's crop of novels submitted for the prize tells us about the literry imagination and psyche after two extraordinary years dominated by the covid pandemic. What imagined worlds have this year's shortlisted novelists created and what do they tell us about the times we are living through? Neil and his fellow jury members academic and broadcaster Shahidba Bari, historian Helen Castor, Novelist and critic M. John Harrison and the novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou, talk about the threads linking the diverse novels on the shortlist. 
They discuss the power of long memory, the resonance of past events lived out in the present, religion and the world beyond conventional truth and the reality that rather than instant response to the extraordinary, it seems that novelists have been at their most compelling when dealing with themes and events that have, as one jury member put it, had time to 'cure and for rage to be suitably polished'.
Recorded before the prize winner decision is made, we hear something of the agonising process of ordering the inherently disordered.

The Shortlist includes:
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, the energetic and exhilarating joyride story of an uprising, told by a vivid chorus of animal voices that help us see our human world more clearly.
Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan. A tender tale of hope and quiet heroism which is both a celebration of compassion and a stern rebuke of the sins committed in the name of religion.
Treacle Worker, by Alan Garner. The story of an introspective young mind trying to make sense of the world around him.
The Trees by Percival Everett, in which a violent history refuses to be buried, combining an unnerving murder mystery with a powerful condemnation of racism and police violence.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. Shehan's rip-roaring epic is a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.
And
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout.  Bestselling author Elizabeth Strout returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any time.

Producer:  Tom Alban

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