You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Hello, joining me today to talk about books they love are two writers.

Sarah Phelps is a dramatist and screenwriter whose TV credits include EastEnders and adaptations of Dickens, J.K. Rowling, and no less than five Agatha Christie's. Most recently, she wrote the BAFTA-winning TV drama, The Sixth Commandment. With Sarah is the author Irrenassohn Okoge, whose award-winning fictions include most recently the story collection,

New Debrank, and published just last month the novel Curandera.

Irrenison is also director and founder of the Afro Futurist Festival, Black to the Future.

Sarah, Phelps, perhaps you'd start. What have you chosen as a good read?

I have chosen Radio Romance by Garrison Keeler, and I've been reading this book for what feels like decades.

It is decades. And I really like this laconic, comic, tense, mid-western drawl about the way he wrote. I absolutely fell in love with this

book, which I was reading when I was a dresser for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and you'd just

carry around these huge books and read backstage while somebody was emoting on stage, and they'd

run off and you'd give them a sword and they'd run back on again and

I'd pick up my book again and I absolutely love this book because it is about backstage life.

It's about a radio station and it's about the dramas and the shows and the people who run it and the people who do the news and the farming news and the actors and which studio

is cursed and who are the writers. And I love that backstage quality to it. It makes me cry with

laughter. And even after this long, long, long familiarity with this book in particular, when I was

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