A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley

For Keyang.

‘Where can we live but days?’

This week, Sally has been reading and living with Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’, from The Whitsun Weddings. Join her for a meditation on how we spend our days,…

‘This is how I prefer to live…inside a narrow passage…’

Sally is still living with Wuthering Heights this week, as she meditates on the nature of life in confined spaces, both in fiction and on her n…

‘I can’t live without story now…it feels like breathing.’

This week, Sally is travelling to Sicily, for a conversation with Marina Warner on ‘Life Writing, Memory and Fiction.’ Before leaving, she of…

‘Are you brave enough to follow me there?’

This week, Sally has been reading Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights. Fixated on the dreams of its narrator, join her for her reflections on rage,…

For Alice Colquhoun.

In this episode, Sally muses on J.M.W. Turner’s famous 1830 painting, Shoreham. Join her for reflections on art, life, and on writing from the faint lines of existence.

Turner’s …

‘A writer’s notebook is full of the sound of atmosphere…’

This week, Sally is teaching a course on detective fiction. Emerging from her meditations on Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone, follow her …

Continuing this week’s Shakespearean theme, Sally describes a recent trip to a screening of a new cinematic adaptation of Kenneth Macmillan’s 1988 balletic interpretation of Hamlet, Sea of Troubles. …

‘All the world’s a stage…’

Sally is thinking this week about a photograph of her foster grandmother in Shakespearean costume. Who is she? How did she find her part? Did she have her experience, like …

‘Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.’

In this special episode, Sally reflects on the work of the late poet Louise Glück as she travels around Oxford. Join her as she muses on feeling, poetry,…

"In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls."

Sally and her neighbour discuss tree spirits and magical bracelets on her narrowboat. As the rains draw in, Sally settles…

In this special bonus episode, follow Sally on an adventure of mistaken identity, Marmite ice cream, and Miss Cull.

This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen.

Special thanks to Andrew Smith…

‘Is there a plot to life?’

This week, Sally has been reading Daniel Martin, by John Fowles. Follow her musings as she considers the relationship between the writer’s public and private selves, anonym…

‘How do you face the void?’

This week, Sally presents a series of linked meditations around the character of Miss Cull, illustrating how characters can be made by, with, and through everyday objects,…

‘Other echoes inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?’

This week, Sally is reading T. S. Eliot in preparation for her performance at the Oxford Chamber Music Festival on the 6th of October. She explor…

‘For all the Froggies of the World...'

Inspired by her amphibian lifestyle, Sally offers an everyday fable of the writer. Froggie and the Golden Ball is a cautionary tale of the writerly career and t…

Sally has just finished a lesson with a student who is writing a story in the vein of Thomas Hardy about a young man on a farm. Searching for visual references, they latch on to a painting of a farri…

Sally is reading A Field Guide to Reality, the debut novel by the Granta Best of Young British author Joanna Kavenna, originally published in 2016 and set in a surreal, quantum alternative Oxford Uni…

Starting a new book is like starting a new relationship, and Sally is reading Elizabeth Lowry's The Chosen, a ghost story and a love story about Thomas Hardy and his estranged wife. 

Sally will be in…

This is the second half of the chat between Sally and Will Self, held at Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford, in which they discuss the German emigré writer WG Sebald, their reading and writing habits, pa…