Golden Globes, Sundance, K-Ming Chang and literary scouts

Film critic Leila Latif joins us to discuss today’s Golden Globe nominations, and gives us an overview of some of the highlights from the first ever online Sundance Festival.

The folklore of Taiwan is visited and revisited by subsequent generations of women in Bestiary, the debut novel from K-Ming Chang, as a Daughter falls in love and confronts her family’s secrets in America. Shot through with a litany of mythical beasts, it’s a novel that offers a charged narrative of diaspora and beauty in a hazy magic realist renderings of California, Arkansas & Taiwan. Author and poet K-Ming Chang tells Kirsty Lang how tracing her own heritage led to a story of queer desire, violence, and identity.

Writers write while agents tend to their interests and publishers bring their works to the public. There is, though, another lesser known but important worker in the books business - the Literary Scout. Their role is to find the right books, before anyone else, and bring them to publishers, all over the world. Scouts have to know everyone and everything and, as we all know, knowledge is power. Natasha Farrant, famous as a Costa Award winning children's author, has been a literary scout for 20 years. Antony Harwood has been a prominent literary agent even longer. On Front Row they discuss the role and importance of the literary scout, spilling the beans to Kirsty Lang...but probably not all of them.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Harry Parker Studio manager: Giles Aspen

Main image: Josh 0'Connor as Prince Charles and Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer in the Netflix TV series The Crown Image credit: Des Willie/Netflix