Front Row

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Front Row: Hanif Kureishi, Ingrid Persaud, Arts Council funding

Hanif Kureishi, Ingrid Persaud, Arts Council funding

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Hanif Kureishi, Ingrid Persaud, Arts Council funding

As a stage version of the Buddha of Suburbia opens at the RSC, we talk to Hanif Kureishi.

Hanif Kureishi on a stage version of the Buddha of Suburbia, the Arts Council on funding decisions and Ingrid Persaud on her new novel The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh.

Hanif Kureishi has joined forces with Emma Rice to adapt his 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia into an RSC production that’s just opened at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon.  Kureishi discusses what it feels like to see himself and his fictionalised family onstage, why his first novel remains painfully relevant and how he has been able to continue writing despite the December 2022 accident that left him tetraplegic. 

Recently on Front Row we heard from some leaders of classical music organisations including the Wigmore Hall and LSO saying that Arts Council England, the body responsible for distributing funding, was putting inclusion before excellence.  Today we hear from the Arts Council’s CEO, Darren Henley about Let’s Create, the ten year strategy behind the recent funding decisions.

Ingrid Persaud discusses the real man behind her new novel The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, an outlaw figure who looms large in the cultural memory of Trinidad and Tobago - an island nation with a wealth of contemporary novelists, including Persaud herself.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Corinna Jones

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Hanif Kureishi, Ingrid Persaud, Arts Council funding

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