The National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke discusses her collection Ice which was shortlisted for last year's TS Eliot prize.

Inspired by the snowy winters of 2009 and 2010, the poems in Ice move through the seasons : from Gillian's experience of being snowed in to the sound of an icicle as it begins to melt. From the bluebells of Spring (inspired by a Renoir painting at the National Museum of Art in Cardiff) through to a hot summer's day and on to the harvest moons of autumn to New Year's Eve.

They also include Gillian's earliest childhood memories, such as the opening poem Polar, which recalls the toddler Gillian lying on a polar bear rug which her father bought in a junk shop; and memories of a more collective nature - mining disasters and ancient British mythology.

The land, language, history and myths of Wales are all present in these poems.

Gillian says a love of language and an inherent ability to articulate is something the Welsh are brought up with, learnt from the early days of attending Chapel; and she says that being National Poet of Wales is no different than getting up at a family occasion and giving a verse or two, a tradition which lies at the heart of her culture.

James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions. Recorded at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea.

June's Bookclub choice : Quarantine by Jim Crace.

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

Turkey's leading female novelist Elif Shafak discusses her novel The Forty Rules of Love.

The novel is about finding love and is written in two strands. One is the friendship between a whirling dervish and the Sufi poet Rumi in 13th century Anatolia; the other is about a mother in contemporary America who finds inspiration in the historical story to break away from an unhappy life.

Amazingly, Elif wrote the book in English, which she first learnt at the age of ten. She then worked with professional translators to write it again in Turkish.

Elif Shafak explains the importance of Sufi mysticism in the novel and in her life. She talks about the influence of her grandmother's superstitions, about the transformation of modern Turkey and how she was prosecuted - and acquitted - in 2006 for 'denigrating Turkish national identity' because of her writing.

First published in 2010, The Forty Rules of Love has now been translated into over 30 languages.

James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions.

May's Bookclub choice : Ice by Gillian Clarke

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

Andrew Miller discusses his novel Pure, winner of the 2011 Costa Prize. Set in pre-revolutionary Paris, the book is a gripping, earthy story about the clearing of a huge cemetery in the area now known as Les Halles.

When a young engineer Jean-Baptiste Baratte arrives in Paris from Normandy, he is charged with the huge task of destroying the church and cemetery of Les Innocents in 1785. He is surrounded by a fully fledged cast of characters : LeCoeur, his friend and former colleague from the mines near Belgium, his girlfriend, the prostitute Heloise, Armand, the church's organist and a revolutionary, and the fairytale like Jeanne. But just as significant to the novel's success are the ideas of the Enlightenment and Miller's subtle laying out the undercurrents of disquiet and unrest which would eventually lead to bloodshed and revolution.

James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions.

April's Bookclub choice : The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.

Produced by Dymphna Flynn.

John Simpson, the BBC's World Affairs Editor and writer Hilary Spurling discuss George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, as part of the Radio 4 Real Orwell Season.

Homage to Catalonia was first published in 1938 and is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. This pivotal time in his writing career led in later years to Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm.

James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions.

March's Bookclub choice : Pure by Andrew Miller

Produced by Dymphna Flynn.

Ben Macintyre discusses Agent Zigzag - his bestselling book on the true story of a professional criminal named Eddie Chapman, a successful British double agent who infiltrated the Nazi intelligence services during World War II.

A notorious safe-breaker before the war, Chapman duped the Germans so successfully that he was awarded their highest decoration, the Iron Cross. He remains the only British citizen ever to win one.

His story is one of chance and charm. Recruited as a spy whilst serving time in a Jersey jail, Chapman persuaded his German spy-masters that he was serving the Third Reich, but when they parachuted him into Norfolk in 1944 he delivered himself immediately to MI5. Because of the advanced and highly secretive code breaking at Bletchley Park, MI5 were expecting this unknown spy, with his German name of Agent Fritz. Reflecting his ambivalent status, his new British handlers called him Agent Zigzag.

Ben Macintyre says that Chapman's missions of sabotage and feeding false messages back to Germany were instrumental in saving hundreds of lives, as well as averting the V1 bombers from St Paul's Cathedral.

James Naughtie presents and a group of Radio 4 listeners ask the questions.

February's Bookclub choice : Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

Sathnam Sanghera discusses his memoir The Boy With The Topknot, which won the 2009 Mind Book of the Year.

Born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands, the book is his account of his childhood in 1980s Wolverhampton.

The youngest of a Sikh family, it wasn't until he was 24 that he discovered his mother had protected him from the family's secret : that his father had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia all his life.

Subtitled "A memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton", writing the book was Sathnam Sanghera's way of confronting his mother with some uncomfortable truths; that after his grammar school and Cambridge education, he had moved away from the family's culture and religion and was not going to accept an arranged marriage. This was a journey of discovery and independence for Sathnam that began on the day he went to the barbers on his own, and had his joora - his Sikh topknot - cut off. When the barber asked him if his dad knew he was doing this, he thought, 'it's my mum you should be worrying about'.

The memoir is a meditation on mental illness as well as class and cultural differences, and in Bookclub Sathnam ponders on whether it was a young man's folly to 'share too much information' by writing down his life story.

January's Bookclub choice is Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre.

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

David Almond talks about his prize winning novel, Skellig, which is loved by children and adults alike.

Skellig is the story of what happens when a Newcastle boy finds a strange man living in the garage of his new home.

Michael sets out to help the ill Skellig recover. With him is his new unconventional friend Mina, who David Almond says is the star of the book. She introduces Michael to the worlds of nature and evolution, and to William Blake's poetry, his drawings of angels, his views on education. David says that when Mina walked into the book she brought Blake with her.

David Almond's story centres on the imaginations of children - is Skellig an Angel, or perhaps a man evolving into a bird? In the programme, David refuses to confirm either, saying that to him, Skellig is as much of a mystery as he is to the reader.

Recorded at the Lit and Phil Library in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. James Naughtie presents.

December's Bookclub choice : The Boy with the Top Knot by Sathnam Sanghera.

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

American writer Marilynne Robinson talks to James Naughtie and readers about her novel Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Marilynne Robinson enjoyed great success with her first novel, Housekeeping, when it was published in 1980. She reveals to Bookclub why there was a gap of twenty-four years before she was able to write Gilead, her second book; and how the voice of the narrator came to her when she found herself alone in a hotel one Christmas.

Gilead is the autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly pastor in the small, secluded and fictional town of the same name, who knows he's dying of a heart condition.

Writing in the late 1950s, Ames tells his story in the form of a letter to his seven year old son, who will have few memories of him. And as well as revealing his fears about what will happen to his family when he's gone, the account traces the family's history back to the time when the prairies around Kansas and Iowa were being settled, through the Civil War and up to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

The voice of John Ames captivates the Bookclub audience, and Marilynne discusses his life and work with themes relevant to her own - solitude and religious contemplation.

November's Bookclub choice : Skellig by David Almond

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

Victoria Hislop talks to James Naughtie and readers about her debut novel The Island, a fictional account of a real life leper colony, the island of Spinalonga, just off the coast of Crete. First published in 2005, The Island has now sold over a million copies.

Victoria says that when she first went to Spinalonga, as a curious tourist, she had no idea that leprosy still even existed in the 20th century. She thought it had been wiped out hundreds of years ago. Even today, around 500 new cases are diagnosed every year in India and South America.

Before writing novels Victoria was a successful travel journalist. On that first visit, her initial idea had been to write a piece for one of the Sunday newspapers, but after fifteen minutes wandering around the abandoned village on the island, she decided to tell the story in fiction instead.

The resulting novel tells the story of a family beset by two cases of leprosy in the 1930s and 50s, before the cure was found. In the 1930s, Eleni, a school teacher in the village opposite the leper colony, catches the disease, probably from a pupil. As the pair are exiled to Spinalonga, we see how her husband and two daughters cope in her absence, one of whom will also succumb to the disease some fifteen years later.

Victoria explores the shame and stigma of the disease through these characters and their lives and love affairs in a family saga stretching to present day London.

October's Bookclub choice : Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje talks to James Naughtie and readers about his 1992 Booker prize-winning novel The English Patient.

The novel tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian villa as the Second World War ends. The exhausted nurse Hana, the maimed thief Caravaggio, the bomb disposal expert Kip who are each haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless burns victim who lies in an upstairs room.

As well as the mystery of the patient, the novel weaves two love stories - one from the past in pre-war Cairo, the other in the Italian villa.

Noted for his lyrical prose, Michael Ondaatje talks about his love of poetry, how the characters of Hana and Caravaggio haunted him so much from a previous novel - In the Skin of a Lion - that he brought them back to appear in The English Patient. He also describes his painstaking method of writing a novel - by longhand in notebooks.

September's Bookclub choice : The Island by Victoria Hislop

Producer : Dymphna Flynn.