A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley

This episode is a meditation, inspired by the themes and characters of Sally's latest book, The Green Lady; it's Sally's elegy for Mrs Robinson, a woman who was shut out of life, not seen or heard;  …

It's the launch day for Sally's new book, The Green Lady, and Sally is feeling the pressure, especially as her neighbours have left her alone on the boat. In the middle of the night, she reads an 18t…

Something different for this episode - Sally interviews writer Will Self about his latest book of essays, Why Read. They discuss not just why we read, but how we read; digital reading versus physical…

In this episode, Sally reads extracts from her forthcoming book, the Green Lady, released next week. The Green Lady is the third part of a literary coming of age story that began with Girl with Dove,…

Sally treads old familiar pathways through fields of corn and wheat in Sussex, very close to the place she grew up. Her thoughts are with Charlotte Brontë, who wrote haunting poems about her own comp…

"Why do we write?" Sally asks herself this week, as she reads a novella by the 20th century writer DH Lawrence, a story of longing, dreams, desire and self-liberation. Sally is interrupted by the arr…

This week, Sally is entertaining a visitor to the narrowboat - her eight-year-old neighbour Maeve Magnus - for their regular evening ritual of watching Poirot and honing their impressions of the TV s…

This week, Sally is reading The Girls of Slender Means, a novella by one of her favourite writers, Scottish novelist, poet and essayist Muriel Spark (1918 to 2006).

During the Second World War, Spark…

Sally starts the podcast with a brief poem by Philip Larkin, a complex poem of springtime, grief, and renewal. The trees all around the boat take Sally’s mind back to the horse chestnut tree of her y…

Sally reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight, and reflects on the importance of finding ways to escape, now and again, from a stressful world - to find a place of tranquillity, where …

Sally starts by telling us the tale of the Boiler That Went Bang in the Night, and the Bird That Never Was. She’s preparing a zoom class for some schoolchildren which draws on her first book of memoi…

Sally does her washing on the narrowboat, and with spring in the air, her thoughts turn to the past. She reads from an old favourite, the children’s classic novel, The Wind in the Willows, and discus…

In this episode, released on the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Sally reads the works of great Ukrainian writers and poets of previous generations. Her thoughts turn to the novelist Joseph C…

In this special, double-length episode, Sally leaves her boat to seek refuge at a friend’s house on another island in Oxford, as the rains have flooded the meadow of her narrowboat community. Returni…

Sally wakes up at dawn and thinks about the book she's currently writing – Pond Life, a fictional biography of two women who live on the south coast of Britain in the years after the Second World War…

Sally takes time off from trying to unblock her sink to conduct a creative writing lesson with her student, Evelyn. They discuss a single sentence in a short story written by Katherine Mansfield, the…

Sally takes a trip on her shiny blue electric scooter to Oxford Public Library, where she picks up a novel by the iconic British modernist writer Jean Rhys. After a disturbing experience at the hospi…

Temperatures on the narrowboat dip below zero, so Sally takes the advice of Virginia Woolf and stays in bed to read poetry. She immerses herself in The Child’s Story, by the Oxford writer Elizabeth J…

On a cold boat, Sally is warmed by her fire, the sound of her neighbours, and the cathartic practice of “speaking in tongues”, a technique she  learned as a very young child from her aunt, who ran an…

Sally leaves a frosty boat and travels to Gloucestershire to meet her friend and fellow author Alice Jolly. They talk about Alice’s epic experimental novel, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, which is written …