This Cultural Life Folgen

Ian McEwan made his name in the 1970s with short stories and slim novels that explored the darker aspects of human nature. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 with his novel Amsterdam, and its follow up Atonement, was adapted as a film and nominated for several Academy Awards. McEwan primarily writes psychological dramas about relationships, but often within a global context of issues including climate change, the Iraq War and A.I. His most recent novel Lessons is his most directly autobiographical, drawing on aspects of his childhood and travels as a young man.In conversation with John Wilson, the author recalls early memories of Libya, where his Army officer father was posted during the Suez Crisis of 1952. He says he first realised the power of poetry, especially that of Wordsworth and TS Eliot, through an English teacher at the state-funded boarding school he attended in Suffolk. He chooses, as one of his formative experiences, meeting the novelist Martin Amis and joumalist Christopher Hitchens, both of whom became lifelong friends. Other major turning points were witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as he researched a book about the Cold War, and time spent in an operating theatre watching neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen in preparation for his 2005 novel Saturday whose protagonist is a leading brain surgeon.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 and Britain’s official representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller is an unconventional artist whose work is as likely to be seen in streets or fields as in museums and galleries. In his work The Battle of Orgreave he restaged a modern civil conflict; a clash between striking miners and police officers. He persuaded a traditional brass band to play Acid House tunes in his work Acid Brass. Perhaps most memorably, on the centenary of the first day of the Battle of they Somme he conjured ghostly platoons of young soldiers all around the UK in his work We’re Here because We’re Here.Jeremy talks to John Wilson about some of his most formative creative influences. Seeing The Who's rock musical film Tommy as a teenager was an unforgettable experience that revealed to him the power of imaginative vision. A chance encounter with one of his artist heroes Francis Bacon strengthened his interest in art history, and time spent with Andy Warhol in New York encouraged him to think of art as multi-dimensional and unlimited. He also recounts how P J Harvey's album Let England Shake and the play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth crystallised ideas he was forming about notions of Englishness which he used in both his work at the British pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and his work to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Errollyn Wallen is one of Britain's most acclaimed and widely performed contemporary composers. Born in Belize and brought up in north London, she was first ever woman to win a Ivor Novello Award for a body of work, and the first ever black woman to have a composition played at the BBC Proms. Errollyn has written 22 operas, as well as orchestral, chamber and choral works which are performed around the world. She was commissioned to write pieces to commemorate the Queen’s Golden and Diamond jubilees, and for the opening of the 2012 London Paralympic Games. She lives and works in a lighthouse in the far north of Scotland.Errollyn tells John Wilson how, after to moving to London from Belize with her parents at a young age, she was brought up by an aunt and uncle in Tottenham. An early love of ballet led her to discover the music of Chopin, and she started to learn the piano at home. She describes the huge influence of Bach on her compositions, but also how her work is influenced by a wide range of music, from avant garde composers to jazz and funk. Producer: Edwina Pitman