Life Stories

photo by Anna Mancini

Life Stories

with Rachel Cusk, Janice Galloway and Colin Grant

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Recorded at the 2011 Small Wonder Festival
at Charleston House, East Sussex

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Sigrid Rausing, publisher of Granta, hosts a discussion with Janice Galloway, Rachel Cusk and Colin Grant on the creative compulsion
to write about their own experiences.

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Historian Colin Grant is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey. He has written and produced several radio dramas and documentaries, including Move over Charlie Brown: The Rise of Boondocks and African Man of Letters: The Life of Ignatius Sancho. His memoir, Bageye At The Wheel, was published in 2011.

Here, Grant discusses his Jamaican family life in 60s London.

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Janice Galloway is the author of three novels and three short story collections, Collected Stories, Blood and Where You Find It. Her first volume of memoir, This is Not About Me, won the Scottish non-fiction Book of the Year. The second volume, All Made Up, was published in September 2011.

Galloway tells of the conflicting mores of her upbringing.

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In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists. Her debut novel, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. In the discussion, Cusk describes her divorce and family breakdown. She has written several books drawn from her own life experiences, including her most recent work, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.

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Listen to

Life Stories

(1 hour, 5 minutes)

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With thanks to the organisers of the Small Wonder Festival for their permission to publish this recording.

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