Ian Rankin and Tahmima Anam
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Crime writer Ian Rankin talks with Tahmima Anam in a conversation organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the Bradford Literature Festival. Plus New Generation Thinker Xine Yao looks at the depiction of East Asian figures in science fiction films and writing. Shahidha Bari presents.
Ian Rankin's latest Inspector Rebus novel A Song For the Dark Times comes out in October. His cat-and-mouse espionage thriller Westwind was republished last September. Tahmima Anam's first novel debut novel, A Golden Age, was inspired by her grandparents' experiences of war in Bangladesh. It was followed in 2011 by The Good Muslim and the final book in the Bangladesh trilogy The Bones of Grace.
You can hear her discuss this in more detail in this Free Thinking conversation with Alain de Botton and AL Kennedy exploring writing about love https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078xlft Ian Rankin can be found in the Free Thinking archives discussing Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09qdpj5
Bradford Literature Festival has a series of digital events running this year https://www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk/ You can find more conversations about literature including several past Free Thinking episodes on the Royal Literature Society website https://rsliterature.org/
Xine Yao is one of the 2020 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects academics to turn their research into radio. The book mentioned in the discussion is called Severance by Ling Ma. You can find a longer discussion about Fu Manchu in this Free Thinking programme called Neel Mukherjee, Images of China https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04jjnlx
Producer: Robyn Read Technical Producer: Craig Smith
Transcript
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| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Hello, if you've been finding lockdown tough going, spare a thought for Edinburgh's finest. |
| 0:42.6 | How has the hard-nosed, hard-drinking Inspector Rebus been coping with quarantine? |
| 0:48.2 | Just one of the questions I'll be asking Ian Rankin. |
| 0:51.2 | He's in conversation with fellow novelist Tamima Anam on today's Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:56.0 | Join them and me, Shah Hadabari, just after this. |
| 1:00.0 | Hi, I'm Amal Rajan and I want to tell you about a new podcast from the BBC. It's called Rethink. |
| 1:09.0 | The podcast is all about the enormous opportunity |
| 1:12.8 | we have to change what the future looks like after the coronavirus pandemic. We've asked |
| 1:17.8 | leading thinkers from around the world to give us their three-minute audio essay on the kind of |
| 1:22.1 | change they want to see, covering issues such as travel, healthcare, homelessness, democracy and humility. |
| 1:29.0 | What kind of change can we expect? Will it be changed for the better? Or will we pick up where we left off as if nothing had happened? |
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| 1:44.9 | lives and in our societies. Subscribe to the Rethink podcast now. You can find it on BBC Sounds. |
| 1:55.5 | Hello, she writes about relationships in a city of rickshaws and revolutionary history. |
| 2:01.5 | He writes about a hard-drinking detective in a city of tenements and trouble. |
| 2:06.4 | Novelist Tamima Anam and Ian Rankin ought not to have a lot in common, |
| 2:10.8 | but it turns out they're on the same page, literally, of the Royal Society of Literatures, |
| 2:16.1 | register of fellows. |
| 2:17.6 | We'll find out if they're on the same page in other ways, too, |
... |
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