Artist Sam Taylor Johnson has photographed a wide range of actors, artists and musicians including Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tracey Emin, Philip Seymour-Hoffman and Alexander McQueen. She's also made biographical feature films about John Lennon and Amy Winehouse, and has repeatedly turned the camera on herself. She talks to us about the art of portraiture and what she has learned about selfhood.
Oscar winning writer and director Sian Heder talks to us about Being Heumann, her unflinching feature about the Disability Rights Movement which is based on true events and stars Ruth Madeley as Judith Heumann, a lifelong activist for people with disabilities, who died in 2023.
Later this month a conference commemorates the centenary of the publication of what is billed as "the wildest, most ambitious, most controversial poem in Scottish literature": Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The modernist poem, in which a drunk man on a moonlit hillside addresses the thistle, the nation and the universe is widely credited with igniting a literary renaissance in Scotland, and also contributed towards the formation of a new nationalist movement. MacDiarmid's official biographer Alexander Linklater and the poet's daughter-in-law, Deirdre Grieve, also a writer, join us to discuss the significance of the poem and the contradictions in MacDiarmid's own life.
And it's emerged that Fleabag creator, writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge purchased a flat in London which is providing a home for playwrights from underprivileged backgrounds. Sofie Mason, the co-founder of Writers’ Block and the director of the theatre charity Off West End, tells why this will make such a big difference.
Presenter: Kirsty Wark
Producer: Mark Crossan
