Adjoa Andoh on Zora Neale Hurston
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actor Adjoa Andoh has a list of TV, theatre and film credits as long as your arm. She's best known worldwide as Bridgerton's Lady Danbury, and is due to direct - and star in the title role - in a new production of Richard III. Her great life is the 20th century American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, author of "Their Eyes Were Watching God".
An iconic figure in the literature of the jazz age, her name was all but forgotten after her death in 1960, before being pulled back into public consciousness in the US by "The Color Purple" author Alice Walker, who famously wrote: "A people do not throw their geniuses away".
With the help of fellow enthusiast Dr Janine Bradbury, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing and Culture at the University of York, Adjoa makes the case that we should all know more about Zora, a trailblazer who - on top of her writing career - researched zombies in the Caribbean and helped collect the stories of slavery's last survivors.
Presenter: Matthew Parris Producer: Beth Sagar-Fenton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to introduce myself. |
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| 0:12.2 | pundits and the biggest sport stars. |
| 0:14.3 | Together we bring you untold stories and fascinating insights straight from the players' |
| 0:18.5 | mouths. |
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| 0:28.8 | dedicated sports fans across the UK. |
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| 0:59.8 | Just listen to that. |
| 1:09.5 | It's the voice of today's great life coming to us from 1939 when she was already in her forties, |
| 1:16.9 | not a singer, but an American novelist and pioneering anthropologist who studied zombies |
| 1:22.8 | in the Caribbean and helped collect the stories of people who'd survived slavery. |
| 1:28.0 | A woman whose name was once famous, then forgotten, before being rediscovered long after her death, |
| 1:34.8 | Zora Neal Hurston, not her to her, nor I until last week, and here to convince us that we |
| 1:41.8 | should have is the actor Adua Ando who's nominating her today. |
| 1:46.9 | She's best known around the world as Lady Danbury in Bridgerton with a string of television, |
| 1:52.0 | radio and theatre credits as long as you're on, and we'll soon direct and star in the title |
| 1:57.6 | role in the new production of Richard the Third. Adua, when did you first encounter her? |
| 2:03.4 | I came out to London in the early 80s and was part of a movement of black feminist creative people |
| 2:11.5 | like Jackie K, Bernardine, Everristo, Grace Nichols. There was a whole bunch of filmmakers, |
... |
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