Arts & Ideas Folgen

The Cairngorms National Park has inspired writing by Merryn Glover, whose books include The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd. Writer and artist Amanda Thomson's book Belonging is on the longlist for the 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for nature writing. As the BBC Proms broadcasts a concert from Perth, they talk to Radio 3's Kate Molleson about place and capturing Scottish nature in their work.Producer Ruth WattsYou can find out more about Amanda Thomson at https://passingplace.com/home.html You can find out more about Merryn Glover at https://merrynglover.com/ This is part of a series of conversations about writing and place recorded for BBC Proms around the UK in summer 2023. You can find more conversations about writing and about nature and green thinking on the website for BBC Radio 3's arts and ideas programme Free Thinking.

The coastline of Cornwall and its communities are the subject of a non fiction book called The Draw of the Sea by Wyl Menmuir. He joins writer Natasha Carthew in a conversation about the importance of place hosted by Joan Passey, who is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and author of Cornish Gothic 1830-1913. Wyl Menmuir's novels include The Many and Fox Fires. Natasha Carthew is a poet and author of a memoir called Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and ResilienceProducer: Luke Mulhall

In The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens portrayed The Black Country as a polluted hellscape where little Nell sickens and dies. So popular was the book that this idea of the region was rivetted into history and endures to this day. In this edition of Free Thinking Matthew Sweet sets out to find the real Black Country, a place whose borders you can cross without knowing, with a reputation for insularity in spite of centuries of migration. In a programme recorded at the Birmingham Hippodrome for the BBC’s 2022 Contains Strong Language Festival, Matthew’s guests are the poet Liz Berry - author of the prize winning 2014 collection Black Country, whose latest collection The Dereliction is a collaboration with the photographer Tom Hicks; dialectologist Dr Esther Asprey, from the University of Wolverhampton, who published the first complete scholarly account of Black Country dialect; the artist and film-maker Dawinder Bansal, who uses her upbringing in her parents' electrical shop, which also rented VHS Bollywood films as the starting point for the art installation Jambo Cinema which was part of The Birmingham 2022 Festival https://www.dawinderbansal.com/projects; and a pair of historians, Dr Simon Briercliffe from the Black Country Living Museum, author of Forging Ahead – Austerity to Prosperity in the Black Country and Dr Matthew Stallard from the Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery UCL who grew up in Wolverhampton.Producer: Olive Clancy.The 2023 Contains Strong Language Festival takes place in Leeds from September 21st - 24th at Leeds Playhouse so go to their website for tickets and listen out for programmes on BBC Sounds.