Storm Jameson - women writers to put back on the bookshelf

What is a writer's duty? Katie Cooper considers Storm Jameson's campaigning for refugees, her 1940 appeal To the Conscience of the World and why her fiction fell out of favour but is now seeing a revival of interest.

Born in Yorkshire in 1891, she wrote war novels and speculative fiction, collections of criticism - including an analysis of modern drama in Europe, the introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank and a host of novels set in European countries. During the Second World War years she was head of PEN, the association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote literature and intellectual co-operation.

Katie Cooper teaches at the University of East Anglia and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. Her book, War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson, is published April 2020.

Producer: Alex Mansfield