This Cultural Life

Errollyn Wallen is one of Britain's most acclaimed and widely performed contemporary composers. Born in Belize and brought up in north London, she was first ever woman to win a Ivor Novello Award for a body of work, and the first ever black woman to have a composition played at the BBC Proms. Errollyn has written 22 operas, as well as orchestral, chamber and choral works which are performed around the world. She was commissioned to write pieces to commemorate the Queen’s Golden and Diamond jubilees, and for the opening of the 2012 London Paralympic Games. She lives and works in a lighthouse in the far north of Scotland.Errollyn tells John Wilson how, after to moving to London from Belize with her parents at a young age, she was brought up by an aunt and uncle in Tottenham. An early love of ballet led her to discover the music of Chopin, and she started to learn the piano at home. She describes the huge influence of Bach on her compositions, but also how her work is influenced by a wide range of music, from avant garde composers to jazz and funk. Producer: Edwina Pitman

John Wilson talks to fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi. Born in the south of France, she designed for various labels before teaming up with Stephen Marks in the early 1970s to establish French Connection as a worldwide clothing brand. She launched her own label Nicole Farhi in 1982 and was one of the biggest names in UK fashion for three decades. Nicole started studying sculpture whilst still in the fashion world, and staged her first solo exhibition in 2014. She has been married to the playwright David Hare since 1992.Nicole recalls the influence of her glamourous and well-dressed aunt Visa who sparked Nicole's early interest in fashion by taking her to the Parisian couture shows. Meeting her partner Stephen Marks proved to be a major turning point and they went on to found two successful fashion labels together. But alongside her life as a designer, Nicole also had a passion for sculpture which had been ignited seeing the work of Giacometti at the Fondation Maeght in the south of France. Her own work in clay was encouraged by the Pop Art pioneer, sculptor and printmaker Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who became her friend and mentor. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Nick Cave, the Australian born singer-songwriter and author, discusses the influences of his parents on his love for literature. He reflects on the impact of Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen on his music and lyrics. Cave also explores the inspirational Australians who pushed against societal norms. He talks about the transformative power of music, the challenges of addiction and grief, and his exploration of religious imagery in his songs.

An inseparable duo for over 55 years, Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore are the artistic couple known as Gilbert & George. Always formally dressed in matching suits, Gilbert & George have described themselves as ‘living sculptures’, and are usually the subject of their own work, which has involved sexual imagery, scatological humour and profane language. They’re best known for brightly coloured imagery depicting contemporary urban life, framed within large scale panels that evoke the stained-glass windows of churches. They won the Turner Prize in 1986, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and were the subject of a major retrospective show at Tate Modern in 2007. They talk to John Wilson about meeting in 1967 while studying sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art, their first notable work The Singing Sculpture; which launched their career internationally; and the importance of Spitalfields, east London where they have lived and worked together since the late 1960s.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Now one of West Africa’s most internationally acclaimed musicians, Baaba Maal trained at a Paris conservatoire and went on to become a kind of musical ambassador, taking stories of his homeland all around the world. He has collaborated with Brian Eno and film composer Hans Zimmer, recorded an album with Mumford and Sons, and was a key member of the Africa Express touring project led by Damon Albarn. A festival favourite, Baaba Maal has energised crowds at Glastonbury and the BBC Proms alike. More recently, Marvel fans know him as the voice of Wakanda, having sung on the Black Panther movie soundtracks.Baaba Maal talks about his early life in Senegal where, as the son of a fisherman, he wasn’t expected to become a singer. He discusses the role of the griot in Senegalese storytelling and musical culture. He recalls early song-gathering trips around West Africa with his friend and collaborator Mansour Seck, his formal musical training in Paris, the powerful voice of Senegalese singer Sory Kandia Kouyaté, and meeting Nelson Mandela. Producer: Edwina Pitman

The internationally bestselling crime writer Donna Leon talks to John Wilson about her career. Although American born, Donna is most associated with Venice, the city in which her Italian police detective protagonist, the mild-mannered family man Guido Brunetti, lives and works. She has so far written 32 novels, has sold nearly eight million copies in English, and been translated into 35 languages.Donna Leon tells John Wilson about her love for Italy and particularly Venice, which until very recently was her home. She recalls her experiences teaching English in Saudi Arabia, and how she began her bestselling Brunetti series after a night at the opera.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Award-winning television dramatist and director Sally Wainwright talks to John Wilson about her formative cultural influences. After learning the art of screenwriting whilst working on Coronation Street, she made her name with her suburban comedy drama At Home With The Braithwaites. Her stories are usually set in the north of England including Last Tango in Halifax, and her 19th century historical series Gentleman Jack. Her most recent hit is Happy Valley, a crime drama that spanned a decade and three series, winning huge acclaim, viewing figures and multiple awards. Sally talks about her early obsession with television, and how the 1970s musical drama Rock Follies inspired her to become a television writer at a young age. She recalls her early career writing for BBC Radio 4's The Archers and the ITV soap Coronation Street and discusses the inspirations behind some of her biggest hits.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson reveals the influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Born in Jamaica, he moved to south London in 1963 at the age of eleven. He made his name as a performance poet, reciting politically motivated verse to a dub-reggae backbeat, and becoming a powerful voice of resistance and protest in response to racism on the streets of Britain in the 1970s. He became the first black poet to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2020, and recently published a collection of prose under the title Time Come. On stage and on record, he is renowned for angry and uncompromising works such as Five Nights Of Bleeding, Sonny’s Lettah, and Iglan Is a Bitch.For This Cultural Life, Linton Kwesi Johnson recalls growing up in poverty in rural Jamaica, where his grandmother told him ghost stories and read The Bible. Appalled at the racism he experienced, he joined the Black Panthers whilst still at school and became a political activist. He began to write and perform poetry, set to music and delivered in Jamaican patois, after being inspired by reggae artists such as Prince Buster and U-Roy, and the American group The Last Poets. Johnson also talks about the tragic fire that killed 13 young partygoers in New Cross, south London in 1981, an event that he commemorated in one of his best known works, New Craas Massahkah. Producer: Edwina Pitman

John Wilson talks to photographer Martin Parr about the formative influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Globally renowned for his witty and satirical scenes of British life, Parr made his name in the 1970s with a series of monochrome photographs documenting the community of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. His fame grew with his 1985 project The Last Resort, which captured the spirit of the great British holiday in images of ice-cream, chips, and sunburnt bodies on the litter-strewn concrete promenade of New Brighton, Liverpool. Since then, his instantly recognisable work has examined subjects including global consumerism, mass tourism and class. He has published over a hundred books of his work, exhibited all round the world, and is regarded as one of Britain’s greatest photographers. Parr is celebrated as Master Of Photography at the 2023 Photo London fair, and has recently opened his own Foundation to exhibit the work of emerging photographers alongside his own. Martin Parr reveals how, growing up in suburban Surrey, he was introduced to photography by his Yorkshire grandfather during holiday visits. He remembers seeing exhibitions by Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the late 1960s, but it was the work of British street photographer Tony Ray-Jones, whose images he first saw whilst studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, that was most influential. Martin Parr further developed his distinctive documentary style, and his use of saturated colour processing techniques, after seeing work by American photographer William Egglestone. Martin Parr also chooses the 1991 film Night On Earth by Jim Jarmusch as a key influence on his quirky approach to storytelling, and reflects on how his style and subjects have developed over the years.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Margaret Atwood talks to John Wilson about the formative influences and experiences that shaped her writing. One of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed authors, Atwood has published over 60 books including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She’s known for stories of human struggle against oppression and brutality, most famously her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian vision of America in which women are enslaved. She has twice won the Booker Prize For Fiction, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and again in 2019 for her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments. Growing up in remote Canadian woodland with her scientist parents, she traces her career as a story-teller back to sagas that she invented with her older brother as a child, and her first ‘novel’ written when she was seven. She recalls an opera about fabrics that she wrote and performed at high school for a home economics project, and how she staged puppet shows for children’s parties. Margaret Atwood also discusses the huge impact that reading George Orwell had on her, and how his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four especially influenced The Handmaid’s Tale. She reveals how that novel - written whilst she was living in Berlin in 1985 - was initially conceived after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan and the resurgence of evangelical right-wing politics in America.Producer: Edwina Pitman