The Death of JG Farrell
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2017
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The two-time Booker prize-winning author drowned off the south-west coast of Ireland in 1979. Vincent Dowd has been speaking to people who knew him, and to Pauline Foley who was the last person to see him alive.
Photo: The road in front of Farrell's home in West Cork, leading down to the sea where he drowned. Credit: BBC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds just before this |
| 0:30.3 | BBC podcast gets underway here's something you may not know. |
| 0:34.4 | My name's Linda Davies and I commission podcast for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:38.3 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely |
| 0:46.0 | engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:54.2 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories. |
| 0:57.6 | And that's just a few examples. |
| 0:59.4 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected. |
| 1:02.8 | Find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 1:06.0 | You're listening to The Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:10.2 | History as told by the people who were there. I'm Vincent Dowd. |
| 1:14.8 | Winning the Booker Prize for fiction is a massive achievement for any author. |
| 1:19.9 | J.G. Farrell did so twice. In 1979, Farrell drowned while fishing in a remote part of Southwest |
| 1:28.1 | Ireland where he'd gone to live. The books of his People Love are the historical novels, always with a strain of comedy, |
| 1:36.2 | looking at the decline of the British Empire in India, in the Far head and in Ireland. |
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