Revisit: Rowan Williams and Simon Armitage
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about Auden, Dostoevsky and tragedy. At Hay Festival he talks to poet Simon Armitage about the imprint of landscapes in Yorkshire, West Wales, and the Middle East, the use of dialect words and reinterpreting myths. Chaired by Rana Mitter.
Books by Rowan Williams include Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction and The Tragic Imagination. He is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Books by Simon Armitage include The Unaccompanied, Flit, Selected Poems, Walking Home, Travelling Songs, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Homer's Odyssey. He is now the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. You can find out more from his website https://www.simonarmitage.com/
A playlist featuring other conversations and in depth interviews with writers is available on the Free Thinking website with episodes free to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8 and you can find more programmes from this year's online Hay Festival https://www.hayfestival.com/home
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. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.7 | Hello, I'm Ron Amitter, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'm revisiting a conversation |
| 0:42.0 | I recorded with two writers, Simon Armitage, now our poet laureate, and the former Archbishop |
| 0:47.4 | of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. In it, they discuss writing about death, history, and in particular, |
| 0:53.7 | the landscape. We recorded it at |
| 0:56.0 | last year's Hay Festival, when you could have audiences at public events. This year's Hay Festival |
| 1:01.4 | has host of events available online and on BBC Arts, so do check those out, and we hope you |
| 1:08.0 | enjoy this discussion. |
| 1:14.1 | Here we are in Hay on Why, with the Black Mountains and the Breck and Beacons to the |
| 1:18.5 | south and the west. In a place known as the Town of Books, we have two writers who have |
| 1:24.2 | long and fruitful, mellow and fruitful, you might say, relationships with the contours of our land. |
| 1:31.1 | Rowan Williams is currently the Master of Maudlin College, Cambridge, and was Archbishop of Canterbury between 2002 and 2012. |
| 1:38.4 | He was born in Swansea to Welsh-speaking parents. |
| 1:41.7 | He's known as a distinguished churchman and a theologian, but perhaps |
| 1:45.5 | fewer people know that he's also a poet. His latest book is titled The Tragic Imagination, |
| 1:51.1 | in which he explores the power of literature. And Simon Armitage is a poet, playwright, and novelist. |
| 1:57.6 | He's the author of 11 collections of poetry, including his latest, The Unaccompanied, |
| 2:01.9 | and Flit. His work has won acclaim from the public and major prizes, including a Keats Shelley |
| 2:07.4 | Award, a BAFTA, and an Ivan Novello Award for songwriting. He's currently Professor of Poetry |
... |
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