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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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In Our Time: Stevie Smith

16/02/2023

Stevie Smith

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Stevie Smith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the writer best known for her poem Not Waving But Drowning

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the writer best known for her poem Not Waving But Drowning, whose success has arguably overshadowed her wider work as a poet and novelist.

In 1957 Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving But Drowning – and its title poem gave us a phrase which has entered the language. 

Its success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary. Her poems, printed with her pen and ink sketches, can seem simple and comical, but often beneath the surface lurk themes of melancholy, loneliness, love and death.  

With 
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia 

Noreen Masud 
Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol 

and 

Will May 
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Southampton

The photograph above shows Stevie Smith recording her story Sunday at Home, a finalist in the BBC Third Programme Short Story competition in 1949.

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