Past Programs
Health - 2008
Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay
03/11/2008
At the age of 21, while studying at Harvard University, Sarah Manguso was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease -- chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP). It's a form of Guillain-Barre Syndrome which afflicted the writer Joseph Heller.
CIDP causes fatigue, paralysis, and imbalance. And then there's the side-effects to the medication. Sarah Manguso calculates that she was sick for nine years.
She has written a poetic account of this experience in her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay.
It's composed in a similar style to her prose poetry which has been published in the collections The Captain Lands in Paradise and Siste Viator. She's also had a collection of flash fiction published -- Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape.
Christina Lamb: writing reportage, writing stories Read Transcript
30/06/2008
We may think we know the difference between fact and embellishment, between objective reportage and storytelling, but do the two ever go hand in hand? One woman who thinks they should is British journalist Christina Lamb.
Christina Lamb was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the British Press Awards last year. She currently works for The Sunday Times in London, and has just released a new book, Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands, published by Harper Collins.
The book is part reportage, part memoir. It includes many of the important articles she's written over the last two decades and her personal reflections on the events that have shaped her extraordinary life and career.
The Anatomist Read Transcript
24/06/2008
One of the most famous books ever produced is the medical text known as Gray's Anatomy, published 150 years ago. In his book The Anatomist, science writer Bill Hayes investigates the lives of the two men behind the creation of this classic, the surgeon Henry Gray and his colleague Henry Vandyke Carter, who was responsible for the drawings.
CK Stead: poet, novelist and literary critic Read Transcript
05/05/2008
Christian Karlson Stead is one of New Zealand's most distinguished literary figures. He is an eminent poet, literary critic, novelist and academic. He was awarded the CBE in 1985 for services to New Zealand literature, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995, and received an honorary doctorate in letters from the University of Bristol in 2001. His most recent book of poems is The Black River and he has also published a collection of essays and reviews called Book Self.
The living end
06/03/2008
By day Dr Guy Brown works at the University of Cambridge, but by night, he tells us, he lies awake and thinks about his death. He's a molecular scientist so he's very aware of how each cell in his body is changing and what's looming for him as he ages. This may sound bleak, but Guy Brown also has suggestions for tackling the approach of death. He speaks to Kirsten Garrett about his book The Living End.
