Short Works - 'My Grandmother's Degree'

Drama of the Week

BBC

Drama, Fiction

3.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amira Ghazalla reads a new short work from Leila Aboulela, as a woman remembers a childhood gift from her vibrant and beloved grandmother. Produced by Eilidh McCreadie Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), she is the author of novels, including Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her collection of short stories Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages, and her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you like a good drama. If it's plot twists and quirky characters you're after, then you'll love the traitors. Uncloaked.
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0:21.0	to the banished and murdered contestants.
0:23.0	I would have never expected him at all.
0:25.8	The traitors uncloaked.
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0:35.0	This is Drama of the Week.
0:38.0	My grandmother's degree by Leila Abuela, read by Amira Gazella.
0:47.0	If your uncle Passus' exams, my grandmother said, I will give you this
0:55.8	bangle as a gift. I held the bangle in my hand, caress the grooves and smoothness, enjoyed the weight of it, then I handed it back to my
1:08.0	grandmother. The results of first-year medical school had not yet been announced.
1:14.5	We all had to wait.
1:16.3	My grandmother, it seemed, with even greater anticipation than my uncle.
1:21.8	She had at one time wanted to become a doctor herself, but gave up her education when she got married.
1:28.0	This was not by choice, but by a sense of obligation.
1:34.0	The assumption that this was the expected thing to do in the Cairo of 1940.
1:40.0	Her greatest wish was that her son, my uncle, would instead become the doctor she couldn't be.
1:47.0	The title Doctor, which prefix his name in every encounter, be it with a prospective mother-in-law or the doorman.
1:55.8	When talking about him to a third party, she would say Doctor too.
	...

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