Rowan Williams and Simon Armitage
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2018
⏱️ 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 the current Oxford Professor of Poetry.
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? |
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| 0:32.0 | Hello, I'm Ron Amitter. |
| 0:33.7 | Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. |
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| 0:52.4 | This is the BBC. |
| 1:02.5 | Thank you. It'll help other people find us. This is the BBC. Here we are in Hay on Y, with the Black Mountains and the Breck and Beacons to the south and the west. |
| 1:08.6 | In a place known as the town of books, we have two writers who have long |
| 1:13.0 | and fruitful, mellow and fruitful, you might say, relationships with the contours of our land. |
| 1:19.6 | Rowan Williams is currently the master of Mordland College, Cambridge, and was Archbishop of Canterbury |
| 1:24.0 | between 2002 and 2012. He was born in Swansea to Welsh-speaking parents. |
| 1:30.2 | He's known as a distinguished churchman and a theologian, but perhaps fewer people know that he's |
| 1:35.1 | also a poet. His latest book is titled The Tragic Imagination, in which he explores the power |
| 1:40.8 | of literature. And Simon Armitage is a poet, playwright and novelist. He's the author |
| 1:46.5 | of 11 collections of poetry, including his latest, The Unaccompanied, and Flit. His work has won acclaim from |
| 1:53.0 | the public and major prizes, including a Keats Shelley Award, a BAFTA, and an Ivan Novello |
| 1:58.3 | award for songwriting. He's currently professor of poetry at Oxford. |
| 2:02.5 | Born in West Yorkshire, Simon still lives near Saddleworth Moore. Could I ask you first what your |
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