“What is made in England these days? How do we relate to the contemporary English landscape? The Arts Council has commissioned some of our leading writers to start the debate. The chosen writers live and work across the country from Newcastle to Plymouth from rural locations to urban conurbations. We also wanted to reflect the different experiences and relationships writers have to the place they live in, people who are rooted to one community, people who have moved around, and people who have come to England from other countries. The pieces are also living examples of how diverse and rich the English language is – whether it is used in poetry, in fiction or in essays.  These writers show us things differently; inform the way we see things; make us think freshly.”

All this week, Radio 4 are running a series of programmes where twelve of the country’s best-loved writers were commissioned to write a piece about being Made in England.

You listen every day at 3.30pm here.

 

Monday 6th Oct: In writer Andrew O’Hagan’s essay on Englishness, he argues that whatever else we have lost we still revel in self deprecation.

Tuesday 7th Oct: Novelist Maggie Gee comes from Poole in Dorset, her parents are English and her parents’ parents are English. So why is her sense of identity more linked to the sea than the land?

Wednesday 8th Oct: Patrick Wright writes: “When I lived in East London in the early 1990s, there was one street above all that seemed beyond hope of improvement or recovery.” He reveals which one this was.

Thursday 9th Oct: A compilation of shorter prose pieces and poems including novelist Helen Dumore on Porthmeor beach in Cornwall in a haunting tale about storms, the sea and watery graves and Daljit Nagra’s ballad set in Cranford Park between Heathrow and Hounslow where a large Sikh Punjabi community have lived since the early 1960s.

Friday 10th Oct: Novelist Beryl Bainbridge writes about her home town of Liverpool and its architecture, which was “built in a previous century and gave a framework to my life”.

For more details of the commissions go here.

If you’ve missed any, you can listen again here.

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