Hello, this is Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast, and I'm Griselda.

This week we're bringing you a special episode recorded in part at the Hay Literary Festival in Cartagena, Colombia, last month.

We'll be hearing from writers across the world on subjects as diverse

as the troubling dominance of the English language, race in America, and the power of silence

in a world that won't stop talking. So this week we're breaking from our usual format

on the podcast because we just didn't want to pass up the opportunity to showcase some of the amazing voices that were the speakers of the Hay Carter Hainer Festival.

So what we're bringing you is a flavour, a kind of best of the festival.

And we're going to be hearing from speakers, including the twice Booker Prize winner, J.M. Kutzea, who as I'm sure you'll all know, is a South African novelist now living in Australia.

He wrote one of my favourite books, disgrace.

I do not like the way in which English is taking over the world.

I do not like the way in which it crushes

the minor languages that it finds in its path. I don't like its universalist pretensions, by which

I mean its uninterrogated belief that the world is as it seems be, in the mirror of the English language.

We'll also be hearing from the Ghanaian American novelist, Yajasi, who published her debut

novel Homegoing last year. It won a raft of prizes, including the John Leonard Prize for

Best First Novel at the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won the American Book Award. It

won a 5 under 35 National Book Foundation Award and the Penn Hemingway Award for debut fiction.

So it's a much lauded and, I have to say, brilliant book.

Trump felt almost inevitable, given the way American history works. When there is progress for black people, there is this immediate backlash.

And finally, we'll be hearing from the Polar Explorer Erling Kaga,

who's just published a book about the power of silence.

I think you need to turn around, maybe for half a minute, maybe for a few days,

...