Writing Real Life from Brexit to Grenfell

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham join Matthew Sweet at the British Library in a discussion organised with the Royal Society of Literature.

Making art from real events is as old to writing as the pen – older. But what happens when the events you are writing about are recent, or happening as you write? What are the writer’s duties to fact? How can writing bear witness to contemporary moments of social upheaval or human disasters? In writing the ‘now’, where does non-fiction stop and fictive creation begin? In this discussion, three writers, across forms, consider how to write real events.

Ali Smith has published three novels in a four-novel seasonal cycle, Autumn, Winter and Spring, exploring time, society and art in the context of Brexit Britain. Jay Bernard’s collection, Surge, explores the significance of events ranging from the New Cross Fire in 1981 to the 2017 Grenfell disaster. James Graham’s play The Vote took place in the last 90 minutes before polls closed in the 2015 General Election, and was broadcast live on Channel 4 on election night. His 2019 drama for Channel 4, Brexit: The Uncivil War, explored the very recent history of the Brexit referendum.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

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.
0:37.7	Hello, I'm Donald McLeod, and I want to tell you about the composer of the week podcast.
0:42.8	Each week I uncover the human stories behind the men and women who created our greatest classical music.
0:49.2	Did you know that Mozart once made an Austrian count so furious,
0:52.8	he actually booted the composer up the backside,
0:55.7	or that Tchaikovsky's family censored his diaries to hide the fact that he was gay.
1:00.7	Ever hear how J.S. Bach drew his sword on a belligerent bassoonist.
1:05.6	Discover new stories and great music every week by subscribing to Composer of the Week
1:10.7	wherever you get your podcasts.
1:16.4	Hello, in April 1963, Philip Graham, the owner of the Washington Post,
1:22.6	gave a pep talk to a gathering of correspondence here in London.
1:27.1	Graham was what we now call bipolar. Four months
1:30.4	after making this speech, he took his own life. So this isn't the most upbeat pep talk than an employer
1:36.3	has ever made. This is what he said. So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft
1:48.3	of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand.
1:55.0	The print journalism culture that thrived in 1963 is now in crisis. Digital media caused that crisis. But it also has
2:03.8	competition from more obviously literary forms of writing, forms that have not always been known
2:10.0	for their agility and topicality, the novel, the poem, the play. Free thinking comes to you
2:15.9	tonight from the British Library, where plays, poems,
	...

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