Helen Mort and Blake Morrison, Oulipo

Teaching writing - mentors Helen Mort and Blake Morrison compare notes. Plus as Georges Perec's memoir I Remember is published in English for the first time, we look at the rules of writing proposed by the Oulipo group which was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Georges Perec (1936 – 1982) came up with a "story-making machine" and created a novel in which the letter 'e' never appears. Queneau's Exercices de Style recounts a bus journey ninety-nine times. Shahidha Bari talks to Adam Scovell and Lauren Elkin about Oulipo.

Helen Mort's books include poetry collections Division Street and No Map Could Show Them and a debut novel Black Car Burning and she is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University https://www.helenmort.com/

Blake Morrison's books include poetry collections Dark Glasses and Pendle Witches, And When Did You Last See Your Father? which won the JR Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. He is Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. http://www.blakemorrison.net/

Their conversation is part of the series Critical Friends organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature https://rsliterature.org/ You can find more writerly conversations in the Free Thinking playlist Prose and Poetry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

Adam Scovell is the author of novellas including How Pale the Winter Has Made Us and Mothlight

Lauren Elkin is the author of The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

George Perec's I Remember translated into English by David Bellos and Philip Terry has just been published by Editions Gallic.

Producer: Ruth Watts