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Start the Week: Hay Festival - Dickens in the 21st century

Hay Festival - Dickens in the 21st century

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Hay Festival - Dickens in the 21st century

Tom Sutcliffe talks to Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Rosen and Natalie Haynes.

Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Rosen and Natalie Haynes discuss Dickens and adaptations with Tom Sutcliffe, live from the Hay Festival.

In front of an audience at the Hay Festival Tom Sutcliffe asks what Dickens would say about the world today. The prize-winning Barbara Kingsolver discusses her retelling of David Copperfield, in which her eponymous hero, Demon Copperfield, must struggle to survive amid rural poverty and America’s opioid crisis. 

Michael Rosen has imagined his own modern Oliver Twist (An Unexpected Twist) and A Christmas Carol (Bah! Humbug!) and reflects on the unspoken grief and trauma of recent years, retold in his memoir, Getting Better.

And while Natalie Haynes’s favourite Dickens adaptation is The Muppet Christmas Carol, she explores how the telling and retelling of stories and ancient myths shines a light on our contemporary world. Her latest work, Stone Blind, looks again at the tragedy of Medusa.

Producer: Katy Hickman

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Hay Festival - Dickens in the 21st century

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