Free Thinking Folgen

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough explores the uncanny possibilities of the In Between with the neuroscientist Dean Burnett, award-winning poet Vahni Capildeo, artist Alexandra Carr, writer and walker of London and other wastelands, Iain Sinclair, and the philosopher, Emily Thomas. How do our brains and bodies react in the In Between spaces of the airport lounge or the station platform where we're waiting to move on but temporarily in stasis and why have so many artists, writers and poets used these places to explore the uncanny, the strange and ourselves?

Amit Chaudhuri, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Daniel Mendelsohn and Emily Wilson join Philip Dodd to explore translating, rewriting and using Homer's epic work to frame a memoir. Emily Wilson has published a new translation of The Odyssey Daniel Mendelsohn has written An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic Karen McCarthy Woolf wrote Nightshift as part of a BBC Radio 4's Odyssey Project which commissioned ten writers to create a contemporary response. Her most recent collection is called Seasonal Disturbances. Amit Chaudhuri has written a novel called Odysseus Abroad which draws on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Odyssey.

Diving from Tudor times through the Brooklyn Naval Yard in the Second World War to present day deep water sculpture parks and swimming with whales. Rana Mitter talks to prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan about the Sea as metaphor and how the research for her latest novel, Manhattan Beach, was the inspiration for its time-shifting, punky, award-laden predecessor, The Goon Squad. He hears from historian Miranda Kaufmann about the existence of a black population of skilled workers in Tudor England, one of whom dived salvage on the wreck of the Mary Rose after she sank laden with cannons on her way to wage war against the French. And he's joined by marine biologist, Alex Rogers, writer and whale lover Philip Hoare, and Jason de Caires Taylor, creator of the world's first underwater sculpture parks to discuss why decades after we first saw our blue and watery planet hanging in space, we still find it easier to ignore our oceans than explore them.