Front Row Folgen

Samira Ahmed and guests Maria Delgado and Isabel Stevens review two of the week’s top cultural picks. They discuss a new exhibition of Spanish art, Spain and the Hispanic World, at the Royal Academy in London and Holy Spider, a film by Iranian director Ali Abbasi based on the true story of a serial killer in the holy city of Mashhad in 2001.Blind artist Clarke Reynolds talks about his exhibition The Power of Touch and explains how he’s creating colourful tactile braille art for both blind and sighted audiences to enjoy.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Sarah JohnsonPicture Credit: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duchess of Alba, 1797, From the exhibition Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, Royal Academy of Arts

A new exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield celebrates the relationship that two of the UK’s greatest sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, had with the Yorkshire landscape they grew up in. Eleanor Clayton, the curator of the exhibition, Magic in this Country, joins the landscape photographer Kate Kirkwood - who has just published a new book, Cowspines, that blends the landscape of the Lake District with the backs of the cows that graze upon it – to discuss the power of landscape to draw an artist’s eye.John McCusker discusses and performs live from his new ‘Best of ‘Album, which celebrates his 30-year career as one of Scotland’s most acclaimed fiddle players and musical collaborators.Writer of fiction and poetry Victoria MacKenzie tells Shahidha Bari about her first novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, which is based on the lives of two extraordinary, trail-blazing fourteenth-century Christian mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.Presenter: Shahidha Bari Producer: Eliane GlaserMain image from Cowspines by Kate Kirkwood

Over the last three weeks Front Row has broadcast a poem by each of the 10 writers shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. The winner was announced last night: Anthony Joseph, for his collection Sonnets for Albert. Anthony talks to Samira Ahmed about his sequence of sonnets exploring his relationship with his often absent father, winning the prize and the attraction of the sonnet form.Research from the film charity Birds Eye View shows that the number of female made films released in UK cinemas fell by 6% last year. The charity’s director Melanie Iredale and film director Sally El Hosaini discuss why women are failing to progress in the UK film industry. Books about witches and witchcraft are increasingly popular, with several new novels published this year. Authors Emilia Hart, Kirsty Logan and Anya Bergman, who have all written about witches, explain why this subject matter provided such a rich source of inspiration.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Olivia Skinner Image: Antony Julius, picture credit: Adrian Pope