This Cultural Life

One of the world’s most successful living choreographers, Sir Matthew Bourne shook up classical ballet in the mid 1990s with his ground-breaking company Adventures In Motion Pictures, later renamed N…

Renowned for tackling big themes on stage, Lucy Prebble made her name as a playwright in her mid-twenties when she wrote the hugely successful Enron. The play, which premiered in 2009 and explored th…

Author, poet and performer Michael Rosen is one of Britain’s best loved and most prolific children’s writers, having published hundreds of books over nearly fifty years, including his much-loved We’r…

Angélique Kidjo, often described as "the queen of African music", has recorded fifteen albums, worked with a diverse array of musical collaborators from Burna Boy and Alcia Keys to Philip Glass and P…

One of the world’s most acclaimed ceramicists, Edmund de Waal is renowned for simple, hand-made porcelain pots and bowls which are usually displayed in meticulously arranged groups. His work has been…

French Moroccan author Leïla Slimani won critical acclaim and a reputation as an author of bold & brutal fiction with her first two novels. Adele is about a bourgeoise Parisian wife and mother who li…

Sally Potter is a ground-breaking film-maker, best known for her bold 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Starring Tilda Swinton, it was nominated for two Academy Awards and won more t…

Actor, writer, comedian and broadcaster Stephen Fry first made his name as a comic performer as a Cambridge University undergraduate with the Footlights company. He went on to forge a television part…

Ian McEwan made his name in the 1970s with short stories and slim novels that explored the darker aspects of human nature. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 with his novel Amsterdam, and its follow up …

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 and Britain’s official representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller is an unconventional artist whose work is as likely to be seen in streets or fields…

Errollyn Wallen is one of Britain's most acclaimed and widely performed contemporary composers. Born in Belize and brought up in north London, she was first ever woman to win a Ivor Novello Award for…

John Wilson talks to fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi. Born in the south of France, she designed for various labels before teaming up with Stephen Marks in the early 1970s to establish Fren…

Nick Cave, the Australian born singer-songwriter and author, reveals the formative influences and experiences that have inspired his own creativity. With his band The Bad Seeds, Cave is renowned for …

An inseparable duo for over 55 years, Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore are the artistic couple known as Gilbert & George. Always formally dressed in matching suits, Gilbert & George have described…

Now one of West Africa’s most internationally acclaimed musicians, Baaba Maal trained at a Paris conservatoire and went on to become a kind of musical ambassador, taking stories of his homeland all a…

The internationally bestselling crime writer Donna Leon talks to John Wilson about her career. Although American born, Donna is most associated with Venice, the city in which her Italian police detec…

Award-winning television dramatist and director Sally Wainwright talks to John Wilson about her formative cultural influences. After learning the art of screenwriting whilst working on Coronation Str…

Reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson reveals the influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Born in Jamaica, he moved to south London in 1963 at the age of eleven. He made his name as a…

John Wilson talks to photographer Martin Parr about the formative influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Globally renowned for his witty and satirical scenes of British life, Pa…

Margaret Atwood talks to John Wilson about the formative influences and experiences that shaped her writing. One of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed authors, Atwood has published over…