Free Thinking Festival – Landmark: Angela Carter
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Angela Carter's work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without equal and without rival'. The award winning author of novels including The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children and Nights at the Circus was a pioneer of English magic realism who re-imagined fairy tales and explored boundary breaking and rebelling against the confines of society. Her non- fiction book The Sadeian Woman explored the ideology of pornography.
Thirteen years after her early death, the novelists Joanna Kavenna and Natasha Pulley join Angela Carter's literary executor Susannah Clapp and her friend the cultural critic Christopher Frayling to discuss Carter's writing and influence with Free Thinking presenter Philip Dodd. The readings are performed by Emily Woof.
Christopher Frayling is the author of Inside the Bloody Chamber: on Angela Carter, the Gothic, and other weird tales which draws on the letters he and Carter exchanged.
Joanna Kavenna is the author of five novels including Come to the Edge. In 2013 she was included in the Granta List of 20 best young writers.
Natasha Pulley is the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and a graduate of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia.
Susannah Clapp is the author of A Card from Angela Carter and Theatre Critic for The Observer.
Recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival Sage Gateshead. Producer: Zahid Warley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.7 | Hello, it's 1979. |
| 0:36.9 | Margaret Thatcher comes to power. |
| 0:38.3 | Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, Offshore, wins the Booker Prize. |
| 0:43.3 | And Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and other stories, |
| 0:46.3 | and the Sadian Woman and the ideology of pornography are both published. |
| 0:52.3 | I would really like to have had the guts and the energy |
| 0:56.0 | and so on to be able to write about, you know, |
| 1:00.0 | people having battles with the DHSS. |
| 1:04.0 | But I haven't. |
| 1:06.0 | I've done other things. |
| 1:08.0 | I mean, I'm an arty person. |
| 1:10.0 | Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. |
| 1:13.9 | She rather characteristically ends by saying, |
| 1:17.3 | So effing what? |
| 1:19.8 | Now, it's Angela Carter, and especially the short story collection, |
| 1:23.5 | the Bloody Chamber, that the subject of this landmark edition of free thinking. |
| 1:28.9 | Angela Carter was born in 1940. She was a war child. She lived in many countries from Japan to the US, |
| 1:36.8 | wrote essays for magazines, radio plays, children's books, script, adaptations of her novels, |
| 1:42.3 | and many fictions, including the Edward winning |
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