Free Thinking - Sjón, Winifred Knights. Katie Roiphe. New Generation Thinker Sarah Jackson.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2016
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Icelandic writer Sjón talks to Matthew Sweet about fiction, poetry and making music with Björk. Curator Sacha Llewellyn explores the art of Winifred Knights, Katie Roiphe looks at writers dying and in the first of our commissioned columns from 2016 New Generation Thinkers - Sarah Jackson from Nottingham Trent University explores touch and frostbite.
Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón was named Best Icelandic Novel of 2015. The English translation which is out now is from Victoria Cribb.
Winifred Knights (1899-1947) is the first major retrospective of the award-winning Slade School artist which will display all her completed paintings for the first time since their creation, including the apocalyptic masterpiece The Deluge, 1920. It runs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from June 8th to September 18th 2016.
Katie Roiphe's new book The Violet Hour considers the deaths of six literary figures Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter.
Sarah Jackson from Nottingham Trent University is one of the 2016 New Generation Thinkers and a poet whose collection Pelt was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio programmes. Find out more from our website and hear them introducing their research in the programme which broadcast on May 31st - available as an arts and ideas podcast.
Producer: Fiona McLean.
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. |
| 0:32.1 | When he was young, the writer Graham Green went to hospital for an appendectomy. |
| 0:37.0 | There was another boy on the ward with a |
| 0:38.7 | broken leg. Quite unexpectedly, this boy died. Green listened to the agonies of the mother and |
| 0:45.1 | remembered them, thinking that one day they might come in useful. There is a splinter of ice, |
| 0:50.5 | he admitted, in the heart of a writer. Tonight's program is so full of writers, I can feel the studio temperature dropping already. |
| 0:58.0 | Katie Roifie will tell us about how authors die and what she's read in their final agonies. |
| 1:04.1 | The Icelandic novelist Shern is here to welcome you into his cold landscape of world war, deadly flu, silent cinema and noisy sex. |
| 1:12.6 | Our new generation thinker, Sarah Jackson, is here to tell us about frostbite and ice candy. |
| 1:18.6 | And slightly higher up the thermometer, a biblical flood has come to a gallery in South London. |
| 1:24.6 | Who was Winnerfritnight? This is the first exhibition of her work |
| 1:28.0 | since she died in 1947 |
| 1:30.4 | and during her lifetime |
| 1:31.9 | she never had a one-man show. |
| 1:34.3 | Submerge yourself in the art |
| 1:36.0 | of Winifred Knights |
| 1:36.9 | later in the programme. |
| 1:38.6 | First though, a man so cool |
| 1:40.3 | that he's one of those people |
| 1:41.5 | who only has one name. |
... |
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