Front Row

In the run-up to the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction on the 9th of September, Front Row will be hearing from each of the six novelists on this year’s shortlist. We begin today with Hilary Mantel, whose novel The Mirror and the Light is the conclusion of her wildly acclaimed Thomas Cromwell series, which began with Wolf Hall in 2009. Ai Wei Wei’s latest work has opened to the public. The Chinese-born, Europe-based artist has created a piece for London’s Imperial War Museum which takes over the entire floorspace of the atrium, depicting The History of Bombs We heard this morning that theatres will have to wait until November to be told whey can re-open without social distancing. That will be too late to plan the lucrative pantomime season. We talk to Julian Bird of UK Theatre about what this means.Electronic at the Design Museum. Design Museum director Tim Marlow on recreating the thumping atmosphere of a nightclub for their new exhibition about electronic music, from Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers

Shawanda Corbett, a ceramic artist and performer whose performances combine dance with music, prose and poetry, is the latest in our series of interviews with artists awarded a £10,000 Tate bursary in place of this year's Turner Prize. She was born with one arm and without legs and has developed a unique throwing technique in order to make pottery. Shawanda bases her vessels on people, referenced journeys out of slavery on the Underground Railroad as well as her own personal history of rehabilitation. Literary critics Sarah Shaffi and Toby Lichtig dissect the longlist of the 2020 Booker Prize. For the full list see below. Writer-director Claire Oakley discusses her acclaimed debut feature film Make Up, a coming-of-age psycho-sexual thriller set in a Cornish caravan park.And we salute Peter Green, guitarist and founder member of Fleetwood Mac, who died on Saturday. He wrote some of the most memorable melodies and riffs of the late '60s and '70s, including the evocative instrumental, Albatross.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Julian May

Nigerian British writer Irenosen Okojie has been announced as the winner of this year’s £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing. It was awarded for her story Grace Jones from her recent collection Nudibranch. We speak to her about the story.Kit de Waal discusses Supporting Cast, her new collection of short stories featuring characters from two of her earlier novels - the international bestseller My Name is Leon and The Trick to Time.Shirley Collins is regarded by many as England’s greatest living traditional folk singer. She was a pivotal figure in the English folk song revival of the 60’s and ’70’s but lost her voice to a broken heart and fell silent for 38 years. In 2016, in her eighties, she returned to music with her album Lodestar, and now discusses her latest release - Heart’s Ease. Star of Hollywood's Golden Age Olivia de Havilland has died aged 104. Cultural historian Matthew Sweet celebrates her indomitable spirit, as a person as well as a performer. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Hannah Robins

Film director Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy - her six part BBC One adaptation of Vikram Seth's huge novel. Set in 1951 in newly independent, post-partition India, its cast of more than a hundred is entirely of Indian origin - the BBC’s first historical drama with no white characters. The book inspired Nair's film Monsoon Wedding, and she has long nursed an ambition to film it. How to Build a Girl is the film of Caitlin Moran’s autobiographical novel. We review it alongside Taylor Swift’s surprise album Folklore, released late last night. Film critic Hannah McGill and poet Be Manzini discuss both, and look at the week's arts news: the delay of big summer film releases and the introduction of an specialist afrobeats chart. McGill reports too on what’s happening in her home city, Edinburgh, which should now be busy preparing for the International, Fringe and the film festivals.In our series of interviews with the 10 artists who’ve each been awarded a £10,000 Tate bursary in place of this year’s Turner Prize, we hear from Glasgow-based Alberta Whittle. She has a Caribbean background and is in Barbados, from where she describes how her film, performance and collage work focuses on post-colonial power, battling anti-blackness, and the effects of climate devastation, something she witnesses first-hand in the hurricane season.Yesterday Andrew Lloyd Webber ran an experimental socially distanced performance in the London Palladium and made a speech saying, "Give us a date, mate." Matt Hemley of The Stage was there. He explains the experience, considers when that date for theatres to open - without social distancing - might be, and the precarious state of things...do Chinese developers have their eyes on the West End?Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May

In July 2005 Anthony Walker an 18 year old black man was killed in a racist attack in Huyton, Merseyside. Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC drama Anthony - inspired by conversations with Gee Walker, Anthony's mother – is a 90 minute film looking at what his life might have been like had he lived. The story works backwards from him imagined at age 25 – married, a father and on his way to a successful career as a lawyer - to the night of his death. Adrian McKinty almost gave up writing but was persuaded to give another shot with a storyline that had been bubbling away in his head for several years, and now the book he wrote has won the UK's most prestigious prize for crime fiction. His psychological thriller The Chain has been named as the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year. The closure of theatres and performance venues during the pandemic has affected many artists, but for dancers it’s been particularly hard. The future is uncertain especially for those young dancers about to embark on a career in the industry. Sharon Watson is the CEO and Principal of the Northern School of contemporary Dance in Leeds. How has the college continued to prepare its students for the future, and what now for those young dancers looking for work in an arts industry struggling to survive? 25-year-old Tyler Mitchell has quickly and suddenly become one of the most in-demand photographers in the world. In 2018, his portrait of Beyoncé on the front of American Vogue made him the first black photographer—and one of the youngest people ever - to create a cover in the magazine’s 125-year history. His new book, I Can make You Feel Good presents his vision of what he calls Black utopia .

Oliver Stone has written or directed some of cinema's most powerful films - Midnight Express, Platoon, Scarface, Salvador, Natural Born Killers. Now he has written a memoir, Chasing the Light - How I fought my Way into Hollywood From the 1960s to Platoon. Making films, he tells Tom Sutcliffe, is his vocation, but getting them done...that's never come easily. Feeling betrayed by his parents' divorce Stone dropped out of Yale, he enlisted as a 'grunt' and fought in Vietnam, then was briefly imprisoned for smuggling hash from Mexico. He recalls studying on the film course at New York University - where Martin Scorsese,a tutor, admired his first short. Even so, throughout his career Stone has struggled to finance his projects - he had to flee from Canada with the print of his first feature. Decades later, making Salvador after global success and winning an Oscar, the difficulties were much the same.Early on Stone worked with Michael Caine and Robert Bolt, gaining insight into acting and writing. While directors such as Jean-Luc Godard improvised, Stone respected the script, yet left room for great actors to work. So Al Pacino 'punched up lines' in Scarface.Stone talks about his cocaine use - which brought him into contact with dealers and gangsters - so was crucial research. Writing Scarface opened doors - wherever Stone went afterwards, he says, corrupt, powerful men had respect for him. Narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar was a big fan.These days Stone is making documentaries. He admires the films being made for television - streamers - but regrets the loss of the communal experience of cinema, a couple of thousand people together, responding to the film. There aren't, he laments, any movies anymore.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May

An icon of 1960s feminism and freethinking, Nell Dunn – now in her 80s - author of Up The Junction, Poor Cow and Steaming talks to Tom Sutcliffe about The Muse, A Memoir of Love at First Sight about her friendship with a woman named Josie who inspired much of her work. Kelly O’Sullivan discusses her film Saint Frances which she has written and stars in as Bridget, a 34 year old whose life is transformed when she starts work as a nanny. It's a gentle comedy which explores issues such as post-coital menstruation, interracial lesbian relationships, abortion, post-natal depression, and conception in a most un-Hollywood-like fashion. For a new project, 846, commissioned by the Theatre Royal Stratford East, playwright Roy Williams brought together 14 British Black and Asian writers to respond artistically to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Elle Osili-Wood reviews the collection of short audio pieces exploring racial inequality, whose title comes from the eight minutes and 46 seconds it took a police officer in Minneapolis to kill George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. And co-founder of Q Magazine David Hepworth on the closure of a cornerstone of rock journalism after 34 years.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Dymphna Flynn

Josephine Mackerras discusses her award winning first feature film, Alice, which she has directed, written and produced. Alice is living an enviable life in Paris with her handsome husband and young son. Then a card payment is refused, their bank account is empty and her husband disappears. He has spent their money using expensive escorts, which gives Alice an idea about how to save her home and her son – and achieve some independence and control. Welsh artist Sean Edwards has won a Turner Bursary of £10,000 for his work, which includes the exhibition Undo Things Done which represented Wales at the Venice Biennale last year and featured his mother's voice which was broadcast live in the gallery each afternoon from her home in Cardiff. We speak to the artist about his work and what this money, which has replaced the Turner Prize this year, will allow him to do.As lockdown restrictions lift, including on live performance, critic Sam Marlowe gives us a run down of what theatre will be happening around the country this summer and how venues are making it work.Many of us have been reading for solace and distraction in recent months. Professor of English, John Mullan has been making the case for picking up Jane Austen - tonight he tries to tempt us with Mansfield Park.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hannah Robins

American actress Alfre Woodard on her powerful lead performance as a death row prison warden in Clemency, written and directed by Chinoye Chukwu, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The government has announced that live performance will be possible again in indoor venues from August. The London Symphony Orchestra has already experimented with socially distanced live performance and their managing director, Kathryn McDowell, joins Front Row to talk about the possibilities and limitations.Our Friday Review this week covers new independent film Come As You are about three disabled men who embark on a road trip in a quest to lose their virginity, plus Ellie Goulding's new album, The Brightest Blue, her first since 2015. And in the light of the announcement that facemasks will be mandatory in shops from the 24th of July, our reviewers Mik Scarlett and Amber Butchart will be discussing the fashion world's reactions to COVID 19. Comedian, writer and podcaster Richard Herring on his new family comedy Radio 4 series Relativity, based on his own family life. Plus we hear about his prolific podcasting keeping him busy in lockdown, and on the plight facing stand up comedy in the pandemicPresenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Sarah Johnson Studio manager: Emma Harth Production Co-ordinator: Caitlin Benedict

Film director and writer Mike Hodges, of Get Carter fame, on his 1989 film Black Rainbow, starring Rosanna Arquette. Despite being critically acclaimed, it went straight to video, but has now been restored and re-released on DVD and streaming.Plus, the financial plight of freelance arts workers in the pandemic: the government has agreed a £1.57 billion rescue package for the arts, but how much will make it into the pockets of the many freelance and self-employed arts workers who have been put out of work? Theatre director Fiona Laird is concerned the money will be swallowed up by bureaucracy, and joins Samira Ahmed to discuss this, alongside Dominic Cooke, former Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre.And Oreet Ashery, one of ten artists to be awarded a £10 000 Tate Bursary - an initiative launched after the cancellation of the Turner Prize due to Covid 19. Working in a range of media, including installation, live art, and video, Oreet talks to Samira about making art inspired by illness: Dying Under Your Eyes, in response to the sudden death of Oreet's father, and Revisiting Genesis - a series of digital slideshows and an experimental film depicting nurses and people with life limiting conditions.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Emma Wallace