Comedian, actor and composer Tim Minchin wrote the songs for the musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl story Matilda which, after more than a decade of sell-out West End shows, has now also been adapted for the big screen. His stage musical version of the film Groundhog Day earned him an Olivier award and seven Tony nominations on Broadway. He also co-wrote and starred in the television comedy drama series Upright, and has performed solo shows around the world. Tim Minchin tells John Wilson about his most important cultural influences and creative inspirations, starting with his upbringing in Perth, Australia. He recalls his earliest attempts at songwriting, influenced by TS Eliot and 90s grunge rock bands, which led to him writing a musical version of Love's Labour's Lost for a youth theatre company whilst he was still at school. Tim chooses the American singer-songwriter Ben Folds as one of his key influences, and particularly the 1997 Ben Folds Five album Whatever Ever And Ever, Amen. He also cites being commissioned to write the songs for The Royal Shakespeare Company's Matilda The Musical, and working with director Matthew Warchus, as a major turning creative turning point. Perhaps surprisingly, Tim chooses an ill-fated musical project, Larrikins, as another important moment in his career. He reflects on how the animated adventure, which was due to star Hugh Jackman and Margot Robbie, was cancelled by studio bosses and the effect that experience had on him.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Florence Pugh was Oscar and BAFTA nominated for her role as Amy March in the adaptation of Little Women. She has won huge acclaim for films including Midsommer, Lady Macbeth, and the Marvel adventure Black Widow. She also played the lead in the television adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. More recently she’s been on the big screen in Don’t Worry Darling, and 18th century Irish drama The Wonder. Florence tells John Wilson how her performing ambitions during a primary school nativity show in which she played Mary with a northern accent, borrowed from her Grimsby-born grandparents. She chooses, as one of her most significant creative inspirations, a woman called Linda Mace who made costumes for all the school productions, and whose store room full of period clothes fuelled Florence’s imaginations. She recalls her breakthrough role in The Falling, about a fainting phenomenon at an English girls’ school in the late 1960s, and how she was inspired by the film’s director Carol Morley. She also pays tribute to casting director Shaheen Baig who helped her secure roles in subsequent films including Lady Macbeth, and remembers working alongside Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson when she played Cordelia in a television version of King Lear. Florence Pugh chooses the song She’s Only Happy In the Sun by the American singer songwriter Ben Harper as source of inspiration, and reflects on her own musical ambitions which started as a teenage singer-songwriter posting videos on YouTube under the name Flossie Rose. She also discusses the pressures of fame, gossip columns and why she’s learned to stop searching for references to herself in social media. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Shirin Neshat is the world’s foremost Iranian-born artist. Best known for her black and white portraits of veiled women, often with hands and faces overlain with intricate Farsi calligraphy, she works primarily as a photographer and filmmaker. A winner of one of the biggest international arts prizes, the Praemium Imperiale, she has shown art in galleries all round the world - except in Iran, as she has lived in exile in America since 1996. As human rights protests continued in Iran, a huge artwork by Shirin, called Women Life Freedom, was shown on billboards at London’s Piccadilly Circus where a rally was staged in support of Iranian protesters. Shirin Neshat tells John Wilson about her upbringing in an artistic, liberal family who lived amidst the conservative and religious Iranian city of Qazvin. She recalls how she was studying art at the University of California, Berkeley, when the Islamic Revolution took place in 1979. With new restrictions imposed on women, including the mandatory veil, she decided to remain in America. Returning to Iran for the first time in 1990, she was shocked by the changes and began to make artworks in response, primarily exploring the theme of power and oppression in two series of works entitled Unveiling and Women Of Allah. Shirin also reveals the huge influence on her work of the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad, who was killed in a car accident in 1967 aged just 32. Producer: Edwina PitmanExtracts from The Wind Will Carry Us by Forugh Farrokhzad, read by Shahrbanou Nilou

Over six decades, Ken Loach has forged a reputation as Britain’s foremost politically-engaged filmmaker, exploring issues of social justice, freedom and power. He has twice won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes The Barley, set amidst the Irish struggle for independence, and twenty years later for I, Daniel Blake, a contemporary British story about unemployment and poverty. Ken Loach recalls his Midlands childhood as the son of a factory worker, and annual summer holidays in Blackpool. It was there that he saw end-of-pier variety acts and comedians, including Jewell and Warris, Nat Jackley and Frank Randle, all of whom helped ignited an early passion for storytelling and performance. He recalls how, after studying law at Oxford, he joined the BBC’s Wednesday Play production team, with the aim of creating television drama out of contemporary social issues. His television films Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, which tackled abortion, unemployment and homlessness, were each seen by over 10 million people, and played an influential part in the public debate about the issues. Loach reveals that Czech cinema of the 1960s, including the films of Miloš Forman, were a huge inspiration on his own filmmaking career, with the use of the naturalistic performances and camera-work that captured the environment from a distance most clearly seen in his classic 1969 film Kes. Ken Loach also chooses as a major influence, the real lives of people whose stories have inspired his films throughout his career, including veterans of the Spanish civil war and Nicaraguans who had seen schools and health centres destroyed by the Contra rebels. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Es Devlin is the world’s foremost set designer, having conceived stage sets for superstar musicians including Beyoncé, Stormzy, Kanye West, U2 and Adele. She has also created sets for opera houses around the world, and for productions at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and many more. Es also works as an artist in her own right, designing sculptural installation pieces that address issues of social justice and sustainability.For This Cultural Life, Es Devlin remembers a scale model of her home town, Rye in Sussex, that fired her imagination and encouraged her interest in storytelling. She chooses the sleeve of Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album The Kick Inside, which she tried to recreate as a collage in her teenage bedroom. She recalls a career breakthrough when, in 1998, she designed a National Theatre production of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, a set which was inspired by Rachel Whiteread’s artwork House, a concrete cast of the interior of a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End, which was demolished in 1994. Her final choice of cultural inspiration is her work with the hip hop artist and producer Kanye West, with whom she collaborated on several spectacular stadium shows. Producer: Edwina PitmanAudio of 'The Story of Rye' with kind permission from The Rye Heritage Centre

Actor and former MP Glenda Jackson reveals the influences and experiences that inspired her work on stage and screen. One of the greatest actors of her generation, Glenda won Academy Awards for Women in Love and A Touch Of Class, and was Oscar nominated for Sunday Bloody Sunday. She has also won Tony, Emmy and Golden Globes awards for her theatre and television work. In 1992 she gave up acting to become a Labour MP, winning her seat five times. But in 2016 she returned to the stage, playing King Lear in London and New York, and to television for a BAFTA winning performance as an elderly women with dementia in Elizabeth Is Missing. Glenda Jackson recalls her working class upbringing in Birkenhead, and how she won a scholarship to the drama school RADA with help from the manager of the Boots chemists’ where she worked at the time. She chooses the director Peter Brook as a major influence on her work, having starred in his radical 1964 stage production of the play Marat/Sade, and the version he subsequently adapted for cinema. She remembers also working closely with the director Ken Russell on several films, including the Oscar-winning Women in Love, adapted from the DH Lawrence novel. Glenda’s comic appearances on the Morecambe and Wise Show in the early 1970s are recalled as career highlights. Glenda Jackson also chooses Margaret Thatcher as huge influence on her life and career, as it was the policies of the former Prime Minister which prompted her to give up acting for 23 years while she served as a Labour MP.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Actor, writer and comedian James Corden reveals the most important people, events and cultural works that inspired his own creativity. He’s now probably best known as an Emmy-winning television chat show host, although he recently announced that he would step down from The Late Late Show in 2023. James Corden is the co-creator of the much-loved BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey, for which he won a BAFTA. His stage work includes Alan Bennett’s National Theatre play The History Boys, and the starring role in One Man Two Guvnors, which won him a Tony Award after it transferred to Broadway. His film roles include Oceans 8, Peter Rabbit, Into The Woods and The Prom. James Corden reveals how he wanted to entertain audiences from a very young age, and his theatrical ambitions were encouraged by his father who would take him to see musicals. He chooses the experience of seeing Gary Wilmot starring in the stage show Me and My Girl as one of his most important inspirations. He also reflects on the experience of working for writer-director Shane Meadows on the film 24/7, which starred Bob Hoskins, and the huge influence on his own work of filmmaker Mike Leigh. James also chooses the television comedy drama series The Royle Family as one of the inspirations for his series Gavin and Stacey, which he co-wrote with Ruth Jones. Reflecting on his recent decision to leave The Late Late Show, he reveals that he was persuaded to move on and pursue new creative challenges by a David Bowie quote. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Author, poet and playwright Michael Morpurgo reveals the most important people, events and cultural works that inspired his own creativity. Michael is the former Children’s Laureate and author of some of the best loved stories for young people including Why The Whales Came, Private Peaceful and War Horse, which was adapted for the National Theatre stage and was filmed for cinema by Steven Spielberg. Sir Michael Morpurgo, who was knighted in 2018, tells John Wilson how his mother, an actress who read nightly bedtime stories to her children, was a formative influence on his later work as a children’s author. He remembers how 1950s teaching methods, in which poems were learnt by rote and literacy was tested rigorously, discouraged him from reading for pleasure. It was whilst at boarding school in Sussex that one teacher recognised his potential, encouraged him to read a collection of Wordsworth poems, and helped reinvigorate young Michael’s passion for words. He recalls how wartime family tragedy, and witnessing the devastation of London in the post-war years, were factors that influenced the themes of conflict and peace which recur in much of his work. He also cites the poet Ted Hughes as a major influence on his life and work, remembering how the Poet Laureate offered advice on his early work. Michael Morpurgo also talks of how his most famous work, War Horse, was initially inspired by an elderly World War One veteran who, one night in the local pub, recalled how a deep bond forged with a army horse helped him survive the horror of the trenches. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah talks to John Wilson about the people, events, and cultural works that have inspired his creativity. Born in Zanzibar, the author and academic came to England as a political refugee at the age of 18, and now holds the post of Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. Since his first book Memory of Departure in 1987, he has written ten novels including Paradise, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994. When he won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the citation praised his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.Abdulrazak Gurnah discusses his childhood overlooking the main port in Zanzibar, and how his experience of multiple nationalities, cultures and languages inspired some of the themes of identity, belonging and departure that recur in his novels. He remembers the political turmoil and violence in the wake of the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar that saw the overthrown of the Sultan and imprisonment of the government. After travelling to the UK with his brother in 1968, he enrolled as a student in Canterbury, the town in which he still lives and works. Among his most important literary influences is The Mystic Masseur, a comic novel by the Trinidadian author VS Naipaul. Abdulrazak Gurnah also discusses the effect that winning the Nobel Prize has had on his life and work.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Violinist Nicola Benedetti reveals her most important cultural influences and experiences that have inspired her to become one of the world’s greatest classical musicians. Having taken up the violin at the age of four, Nicola won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at 16. She’s renowned for the passion of her live concerts, her recordings of the great violin concertos, and for her work with contemporary composers, including a Grammy-winning collaboration with composer Wynton Marsalis. She’s also deeply involved in educational programmes that use classical music to transform the lives of young people. For This Cultural Life, Nicola Benedetti recalls her North Ayrshire upbringing and how her Italian parents encouraged her musicality from a young age. She remembers first listening to Brahms’s Violin Concerto on the car journey to school, a piece that inspired her to seriously pursue her ambitions, becoming the leader of the National Children’s Orchestra at the age of just eight. She discusses the influence of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, whose school she attended until she was 15, and at whose funeral she performed in 1999. Nicola also talks about her work with the Sistema Scotland project, and her own Benedetti Foundation, which promotes musical education. Determined to promote contemporary classical music as well as the traditional repertoire, she discusses her work with Wynton Marsalis and the young British composer Mark Simpson, both of whom have written violin concertos for her.Producer: Edwina Pitman