Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Seamus Heaney. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

New critical biographies of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney and a reissue of Anne Sexton's poems prompt a conversation for National Poetry Day about our image of a poet. Is it possible to separate a poet's life from their work? Shahidha Bari is joined by New Generation Thinkers Sophie Oliver and Peter Mackay, and by Plath biographer Heather Clark. And she talks to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi about her new novel, The First Woman – a coming of age story of a young girl in Uganda, mixing modern feminism and folk beliefs against a backdrop of Idi Amin’s regime.

The First Woman is out now. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and her other books are Kintu and the short story collection Manchester Happened.

Mercies: Selected Poems by Anne Sexton is being issued in the Penguin Modern Classics series in November 2020

On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster is published by Princeton University Press

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark is published in October by Vintage.

Sophie Oliver teaches at the University of Liverpool and researches women and modernist writers, including Jean Rhys. She also writes for the TLS, Burlington Magazine, and The White Review.

Peter Mackay teaches at the University of St Andrews and has published writing on Sorley MacLean; an anthology, An Leabhar Liath: 500 years of Gaelic Love and Transgressive Verse; and his own collection of poems Gu Leòr / Galore.

Free Thinking has a playlist of conversations about prose and poetry on the website - all available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

If you have been affected by the mental health issues in this programme, you can find details of support organisations from the BBC Action Line website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4WLs5NlwrySXJR2n8Snszdg/emotional-distress-information-and-support

Producer: Emma Wallace