Private Passions

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

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Isabel Wilkerson

Michael Berkeley's guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson.

Michael Berkeley's guest is Pulitzer prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape poor economic conditions and discrimination. Isabel later wrote about this exodus in her bestselling and widely acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns, the product of 15 years of research and more than 1200 interviews. 

She started out in newspapers as a reporter and feature writer, and in 1994 she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, when she was Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times.  More recently she published her second book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents, an examination of racial stratification. The New York Times described it as the “keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far” and it also won praise from President Obama. 

Isabel's choices include works by Camille Saint-Saëns, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Georg Philipp Telemann.

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.

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