The Essay

Jon Gower, writer and keen walker of the Welsh mountains, explores the unique characteristics of each of Wales's five ranges and reflects on what they mean to the people who live among them.For many people, Wales is synonymous with its mountains. They occupy a unique place in the country's ancient mythology, its history and its culture, defining who rules the country, who lives in it, and how they survive. But each of the mountain ranges of Wales has its own unique character. In this series of The Essay, Jon Gower paints a detailed portrait of the landscape of these higher places, and in doing so, explores how they’ve shaped the country's psyche.In his essay on Epynt, Jon reflects on a landscape that offers meagre grazing for animals, dotted with small ponds and peat bogs, and which remains haunted by the eviction of many inhabitants by the War Office in 1939. Given over to military training, the scything of wind through the tough grasses is for most of the year punctuated by the sound of mortar fire, anti-tank weaponry and machine guns.Producer: Megan Jones for BBC Cymru Wales

Jon Gower, writer and keen walker of the Welsh mountains, explores the unique characteristics of each of Wales's five ranges and reflects on what they mean to the people who live among them.For many people, Wales is synonymous with its mountains. They occupy a unique place in the country's ancient mythology, its history and its culture, defining who rules the country, who lives in it, and how they survive. But each of the mountain ranges of Wales has its own unique character. In this series of The Essay, Jon Gower paints a detailed portrait of the landscape of these higher places, and in doing so, explores how they’ve shaped the country's psyche.Jon sees the Brecon Beacons as being all about water - from their formation by gargantuan glaciers, rumbling slowly across the land gouging valleys and shuffling rocks ever onward, to the many waterfalls tumbling into space. The most remarkable of these is Sgwd yr Eira, the ‘fall of snow’, a veritable avalanche of spume and rush where you can actually walk behind the curtain of water. Producer: Megan Jones for BBC Cymru Wales

Jon Gower, writer and keen walker of the Welsh mountains, explores the unique characteristics of each of Wales's five ranges and reflects on what they mean to the people who live among them.For many people, Wales is synonymous with its mountains. They occupy a unique place in the country's ancient mythology, its history and its culture, defining who rules the country, who lives in it, and how they survive. But each of the mountain ranges of Wales has its own unique character. In this series of The Essay, Jon Gower paints a detailed portrait of the landscape of these higher places, and in doing so, explores how they’ve shaped the country's psyche.In ‘The Black Mountains’, Jon looks at the way these hills, benign and balmy on some occasions, at others beset by fierce weather, have attracted writers and poets to it like a honeypot, from Owen Sheers to Jan Morris: just as Ordnance Survey maps are covered in contour lines, so too is the landscape around here seemingly covered in lines, of poetry.Producer: Megan Jones for BBC Cymru Wales

Jon Gower, writer and keen walker of the Welsh mountains, explores the unique characteristics of each of Wales' five ranges and reflects on what they mean to the people who live among them.For many people, Wales is synonymous with its mountains. They occupy a unique place in the country's ancient mythology, its history and its culture, defining who rules the country, who lives in it, and how they survive. But each of the mountain ranges of Wales has its own unique character. In this series of The Essay, Jon Gower paints a detailed portrait of the landscape of these higher places, and in doing so, explores how they’ve shaped the country's psyche.In the first essay Jon considers Snowdonia as a place of refuge, from the Welsh princes that built their castles here to take advantage of the natural defensive system, to the rare plants finding sanctuary on almost unscalable ledges. In ‘The Black Mountains’, Jon looks at the way these hills, benign and balmy on some occasions, at others beset by fierce weather, have attracted writers and poets to it like a honeypot, from Owen Sheers to Jan Morris: just as Ordnance Survey maps are covered in contour lines, so too is the landscape around here seemingly covered in lines, of poetry.Jon sees the Brecon Beacons as being all about water - from their formation by gargantuan glaciers, rumbling slowly across the land gouging valleys and shuffling rocks ever onward, to the many waterfalls tumbling into space. The most remarkable of these is Sgwd yr Eira, the ‘fall of snow’, a veritable avalanche of spume and rush where you can actually walk behind the curtain of water. In his essay on Epynt, Jon reflects on a landscape that offers meagre grazing for animals, dotted with small ponds and peat bogs, and which remains haunted by the eviction of many inhabitants by the War Office in 1939. Given over to military training, the scything of wind through the tough grasses is for most of the year punctuated by the sound of mortar fire, anti-tank weaponry and machine guns.And in ‘The Preseli Mountains’, Jon explores the most mystical range of mountains, which are barely mountains, though the highest of them, Foel Cwmcerwyn, stands tall and sentinel enough to have guided the sailors of west Wales safely to shore. On a clear day you can see not only the patterned field tapestries of Pembrokeshire – shot through with the gold threads of gorse hedges – but also nine other Welsh counties, and the charcoal edge of Ireland across the sea.Producer: Megan Jones for BBC Cymru Wales

The novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) brought to life a large comic heroine who bucked 19th-century conventions. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore outlines the prolific writing career of Margaret Oliphant and laments the way she was used by fellow novelist Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the dangers of needing to write for money to keep yourself and your family afloat. Producer: Paula McGinley

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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, was published April 2020. If you are an early career academic interested in applying for this year's scheme, you can find details of how to apply on the AHRC website under Funding Opportunities. Producer: Alex Mansfield

New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau argues that we should salute this woman who supported her family through her writing, who perfected sonnets about solitude before Wordsworth began writing his, and who explored the struggles of women and refugees in her fiction. Mother to 12 children, Charlotte Turner Smith wrote ten novels, three poetry collections and four children's books and translated French fiction. In 1788 her first novel, Emmeline, sold 1500 copies within months but by the time of her death in 1803 her popularity had declined and she had become destitute. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to turn their research into radio.Producer: Robyn Read

New Generation Thinker Zoe Norridge describes translating the testimony of a nurse who survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. In Rwanda, Yolande Mukagasana is a well-known writer, public figure and campaigner for remembrance of the genocide. She has authored three testimonies, a collection of interviews with survivors and perpetrators and two volumes of Rwandan stories. Her work has received numerous international prizes, including an Honourable Mention for the Unesco Education for Peace Prize. Zoe Norridge, from King’s College London, argues there should be a place for Mukagasana on our shelves in UK, alongside works from the Holocaust and other genocides. Why? Because listening to survivor voices helps us to understand the human cost of mass violence. Producer: Luke Mulhall

As an injured soldier under house arrest, Xavier de Maistre staved off boredom by imagining every step around his drawing room was a step across a country; Virginia Woolf’s writerly wandering around central London to buy a pencil exposed the city's transformation in darkness. Inspired by these ironic quests and symbolic expeditions, five contemporary writers embark on walks of entertaining eccentricity.Author and academic Sophie Coulombeau completes these imaginative journeys with her newborn baby navigating York - a city and self once familiar, but now elusive and uncanny.Producer: Ciaran Bermingham