A Good Read: Zing Tsjeng and Yomi Ṣode
Books and Authors
BBC
4.2 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Journalist, broadcaster and author Zing Tsjeng and poet Yomi Ṣode join presenter Harriett Gilbert to talk about the books they love.
Zing chooses a book set in the heart of New York City's queer community. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is centred on the lives of Reece, a trans woman, her ex Ames, and her ex's new lover, Katrina. Yomi recommends Caleb Azumah Nelson's debut book, Open Water, a lyrical romance story set in South East London. And Harriett's choice is Intimacies, a novel by Katie Kitamura, where the main character is an interpreter at the International Court in The Hague, where unease bubbles below the surface of the novel's cool narration.
Comment on instagram: @agoodreadbbc Produced by Eliza Lomas
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation. |
| 0:07.0 | It was an extraordinary news story. |
| 0:09.0 | The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny, |
| 0:14.0 | mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared. |
| 0:18.0 | One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for |
| 0:21.7 | Lucan. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex von |
| 0:26.7 | Tundselman. This is The Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, today a trio of love |
| 0:33.8 | stories about as different from each other as you can get. |
| 0:39.8 | With me to introduce their good read are two writers. |
| 0:44.1 | Zing Singh is a Singaporean journalist, editor, writer and presenter, |
| 0:48.0 | whose full book series Forgotten Women brings centre stage the lives of inspirational women marginalised by history. |
| 0:51.7 | With Zing is the Nigerian British poet Yomi Shode, whose debut collection, mannerism, |
| 0:57.0 | published last year, interweaves English with Yoruba to explore Black British masculinity. |
| 1:03.0 | Yomi, would you start us off? |
| 1:05.0 | What have you chosen as a good read? |
| 1:07.0 | My good read is Open Water by Caleb, Azuma Nelson. |
| 1:18.2 | I call him the cultural archivist of our time, and Open Water was the process that kind of started that for me. |
| 1:25.2 | I'm following the journey of this man, this love story between him and a dancer, |
| 1:29.3 | interwoven within the landscape and the landscape is around South East London. And in this area, we have this individual that is living everyday life |
| 1:35.3 | and portrays a different kind of survival, a different kind of existence, a different kind of ways |
| 1:43.3 | in which one identifies with love, with masculinity, with their friends, with having, like, family around as well. |
| 1:52.5 | And it told me to a certain degree that this can happen. |
... |
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