Front Row Folgen

American singer songwriter Loudon Wainwright III performs live in the studio and talks about his decades-long career, his current UK tour and his latest album titled Lifetime Achievement.Tonight the six books on this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced. The literary critic Max Liu joins us to comment. One of these six shortlisted authors will be chosen as the overall winner on 17 October when the ceremony will be broadcast live on Front Row.English Literature has dropped out of the top ten A-level subjects in England for the first time. What does it reveal about the status of the subject and its importance in the creative industries? Samira hears from Vicky Bolton, head of English at Wales High school in Sheffield; Sam Cairns, co-director of The Cultural Learning Alliance; and Geoff Barton, a former English teacher and head teacher, now the general secretary of the teaching union, the Association of School and College Leaders. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Paul WatersImage: Loudon Wainwright III Photographer credit: Shervin Lainez

David Cronenberg’s new film Crimes of the Future is a science fiction body parts horror movie starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux. In a time when pain no longer exists a couple are using organ removal surgery as performance art. Leila Latif reviews and gives a run down on the films being shown at this year’s Venice Film Festival, including The Whale and Banshees of Inisherin.Tom Chaplin came to fame as the lead singer of Keane. With the release of his third solo album Midpoint, he talks to Tom Sutcliffe and performs two songs - Gravitational, and Overshoot - live in the studio.We hear from one of the thirteen writers on the Booker Prize longlist, Sri Lankan Shehan Karunatilaka, who’s waiting to hear if he’ll also be on the shortlist announced tomorrow. His 2010 debut novel, Chinaman, was garlanded with awards, including the Commonwealth Prize. Will his second book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, also be a winner? Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Nicki Paxman

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is a prequel and in keeping with the epic scale of Tolkein’s books and their film versions it doesn’t begin a two years before The Hobbit but two thousand. Sci-fi novelist Temi Oh and film critic Tim Robey review the Amazon Prime series. They also consider the merits of another millennia spanning work, George Miller’s film Three Thousand Years of Longing. It’s a radical departure for the director of the Mad Max films; an adaptation of a short story by A. S. Byatt staring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, who plays a djinn – a genie. So, it should be good…but is it?Samira Ahmed talks to Nick Drnaso, whose Sabrina was the first graphic novel to be selected for the Booker Prize longlist. In his new one, Acting Class, ten strangers come together in the class run by the mysterious John Smith, who is possibly a charlatan. His students, all very different, share one uniting need, for change.The lights went out on the final performances of this year’s Edinburgh Festivals on Monday. It’s being said that there were fewer people attending fewer shows and that prices, especially of accommodation, were prohibitive. And then the binnies went on strike and the elegant streets of Scotland’s capital were strewn with rubbish. So, Pauline McClean, BBC Scotland’s Arts Correspondent wonders, were the festivals successful? Does there need to be some change? And, marking Mikhail Gorbachev’s death, a poem from The Poetry of Perestroika, a pioneering anthology made possible by his reforms. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producers: Yasmin Allen and Julian May Production Co-ordinator: Lizzie HarrisImage: taken from Acting Class by Nick Drnaso, published by Granta