Front Row

Live from the Roundhouse, London, Front Row brings you the 2020 Booker Prize ceremony. Who will be the winner of the £50,000 prize for fiction in this extraordinary year?

Taking part in the socially distanced proceedings will be Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, last year's winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, chair of judges Margaret Busby, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, former President of the United States Barack Obama - and of course, the winner. The evening will be hosted by Front Row's John Wilson and broadcast simultaneously on BBC iPlayer.

The shortlisted authors and titles are:

Presenter: John Wilson

Gillian Anderson on her technique for perfecting Margaret Thatcher’s distinctive voice in the fourth season of The Crown, and the recent debate the TV series has ignited over what is fact and fiction.

South Georgia is a remote, windswept and icy Antarctic island, with no permanent population. But much of the industrial whaling industry was based here until the 1960s, when there were scarcely any whales left to slaughter. Now, though, whales are returning. Rats and mice that came with the whaling ships and ate chicks in their nests and burrows have been eradicated, and the seabirds are flourishing. To mark this history and celebrate the change there's been a competition to create an artwork on the site of the Grytviken whaling station. We speak to the Scottish sculptor Michael Visocchi about his inspiration and plans.

We’ll soon know who has been awarded the 2020 Booker Prize. Novelist Sara Collins, whose debut The Confessions of Frannie Langton won the 2019 Costa First Novel Award, Ellah Wakatama, Editor at Large at Canongate, and literary critic John Self discuss the role of literary prizes with the BBC’s Elle Osili-Wood on the eve of one of the biggest highlights of the literary calendar.

Producer: Julian May

Main image: Gillian Anderson as Margaret thatcher in The Crown

Patrick is a black comedy from Belgium set in a woodland nudist camp. After his father dies and leaves him to run the campsite, Patrick’s favourite hammer is stolen, and he finds himself on an existential quest as he attempts to recover his beloved tool. The film is by Tim Mielants who directed the third series of Peaky Blinders. Briony Hanson gives us her verdict.

The Dublin residence known as The House Of The Dead because James Joyce used it as the setting for part of his 1914 short story The Dubliners is in the news because developers want to turn it into a 50-bed hostel. Many important Irish writers have objected, saying that it would 'destroy an essential part of Ireland’s cultural history'. Colm Tóibín explains why he thinks the development shouldn’t go ahead.

The poet Christopher Reid won the Costa Book of the Year in 2009 with A Scattering, in which he reflected on the death of his wife Lucinda. Today he discusses his new collection The Late Sun, in which he also memorialises those recently departed, including his mother, but also celebrates the vitality of living, as well as travel and the reality of the day-to-day experience.

Scottish singer songwriter Amy Macdonald talks about her fifth album The Human Demands, which spans a range of emotions, from the happiness of falling in love to a feeling of loneliness.

Presenter Samira Ahmed

Fela Kuti was the creator of Afrobeat – a blend of traditional Yoruba and Caribbean music with funk and jazz that exhilarated the global music scene in the 1970s and gave rise more recently to the Afrobeats scene from Burna Boy to Tiwa Savage. A new documentary by the Nigerian novelist and playwright Biyi Bandele aims to chart Fela Kuti’s rise to fame and politicisation in 1960s Lagos and the US. As Nigerians march the streets to protest at police brutality, using Fela Kuti’s music as a backdrop, Samira talks to Biyi Bandele about his musical and political legacy.

With the Booker shortlist featuring books which deal with trauma – from Diana Cook’s The New Wilderness following a mother trying to keep her daughter safe after an environmental disaster and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain about a childhood blighted by poverty and addiction in 1980s Glasgow we explore the issues for writers in writing about trauma in both fiction and non fiction with writers Meg Rosoff and Monique Roffey and the critic Suzi Feay.

The Queen’s Gambit is a new miniseries on Netflix which tells the story of a young female chess genius. It’s being hailed as “one of their best ever shows” but how is a drama about 32 chess pieces and 64 black and white squares so compelling? Roisin O’Connor is a big fan and eager to tell everyone how wonderful it is.

Main image: Fela Kuti

The Simpsons is the longest running scripted primetime TV show ever. As season 31 kicks off in the UK we explore its potent popularity with comedian and fan David Baddiel and writer, producer, and story editor on thes how Tim Long who’s worked on more than 450 episodes

Photographer Simon Phipps discusses his book Brutal North, a celebration of modernist and brutalist architecture in the north of England. The post-war years saw the building of some of the most aspirational and successful modernist architecture in the world, from Newcastle’s Byker Wall Estate to the Preston bus station, completed in 1969. But how vulnerable are these buildings today?

British film director Steve McQueen has achieved Oscar success but his latest project sees him returning to the small screen with a series of five new dramas for BBC TV, set in London’s West Indian community between 60s and the 80s.

Jenny Sturgeon’s new album is inspired by and takes its title from Nan Shepherd’s book about the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, which, though slender, has had a profound influence, changing the way we relate to high and wild places. There are 12 chapters and Sturgeon has written a song for each. She talks about recording them in the mountains, with a backing track of natural sounds. She tells, too, the story of her guitar, made from local materials – an old shelf from a local bar and even heather and lichen growing in the Cairngorms.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

We conclude our tour of the novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 tonight with a final book group where listeners put their questions to Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life. A campus novel and a coming-of-age story, it tells the experiences of a gay, Black doctoral student in a predominantly White, PhD programme at a supposedly enlightened American university.

With part of Sir Malcolm Arnold’s archive under threat of destruction by the Ministry of Justice, cellist Julian Lloyd Webber argues that these papers are important to the 20th Century British composer’s legacy.

Throughout the period of two lockdowns, self-isolation and working from home, we’ve been hearing from individuals in the creative industries about something that has given them a lot of pleasure, and occasionally brought them solace, in these challenging times. Tonight it’s the turn of Nick Park, the Oscar-winning creator of Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, and many other Aardman classics, to reveal his personal Lockdown Discovery.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Tana French is the creator of the Dublin Murder Squad crime books, that inspired the 2019 BBC TV series. Her gritty urban mysteries have been translated into 37 languages and sold around 7m copies worldwide, gaining praise from the likes of Stephen King and Marian Keyes. Her latest novel, The Searcher, moves the action to rural Ireland for the first time. A retired Chicago police officer reluctantly takes on the search for a missing teenager in a small town that seems tranquil on the surface but in reality is anything but.

A new statue dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century advocate of women's rights, was unveiled this week at Newington Green in Islington, London, created by Maggi Hambling. It very quickly drew criticism from some because of its inclusion of a naked female figure. The art historian Jacky Klein gives her assessment.

Industry is a new BBC2 drama, directed by Lena Dunham, set in the financial district in London and focuses on a new intake of 20-somethings who must all compete for a limited set of positions at a top investment bank in London. Kohinoor Sahota reviews.

Today is Armistice Day, and the day that, 100 years ago, the body of an unidentified soldier killed in the First World War was drawn in a solemn procession through London to be laid to rest at Westminster Abbey. The story of The Unknown Warrior moved the English musician Ralph McTell to write a song chronicling it. In Front Row he talks about this, the powerful symbolism of the ceremony and how he recruited Billy Connolly, Anthony Hopkins and Liam Neeson from each of the other nations of the United Kingdom, to speak some of his words.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Main image: Tana French

The cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe grew up in a township in the south of Johannesburg and creates music that draws on classical, African and contemporary music. He talks to Samira about As You Are, the music he’s composed for Opera North’s sound-walks in Leeds and about the celebration of music from Africa which he’s leading in collaboration with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at this year's London Jazz Festival.

At the age of 86, film legend Sophia Loren stars in her first film in almost a decade, The Life Ahead. Directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, she plays a former sex worker who looks after a Senegalese migrant boy. Edoardo talks to Samira about directing his mother sixty years after she won a Best Actress Oscar for Two Women.

Billie is a new online documentary about the jazz singer Billie Holiday which uses material collected by the journalist Linda Kipnack Kuehl: archive, colourisation techniques and previously unheard recordings of interviews with people who knew her. Tega Okiti reviews.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Ulysses, Hercules, Jason and Achilles - classical mythology is all about men of action. The women tend to have things - often horrible - happen to them: they get kidnapped, raped, abandoned. The Roman poet Ovid wrote a series of fictional letters, The Heroides, giving voice to these put-upon women. 15 leading British dramatists, all women or non-binary, have drawn on Ovid, recasting their stories for our times, and filmed live in an empty theatre for streaming. Front Row hears about the 15 Heroines project from director Adjoa Andoh and writers Natalie Haynes and Juliet Gilkes Romero.

In advance of the winner announcement on the 19th of November here on Front Row, we’ve another of our Booker Prize Book Groups. Tonight’s it’s the turn of Douglas Stuart, who will be meeting readers to answer questions about his novel Shuggie Bain. It’s the story of a powerful bond between a mother suffering from addiction and a son whose nascent sexuality marks him out as different. The Booker Prize 2020 judges called the book “an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.”

Front Row reveals how, as well as reading from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy on the campaign trail, and quoting the 'To every thing there is a season' verses from Ecclesiastes, in his victory speech President Elect Biden made a reference to the Langston Hughes poem Harlem - a subtle touch that will not be lost on African American voters.

Presenter: John Wilson

Main image above: Olivia Williams as Hypsipyle by Natalie Haynes, part of 15 Heroines.

The death of Geoffrey Palmer was announced today. Two of his leading co-stars, Dame Judi Dench and Wendy Craig, pay tribute.

Ruth Wilson plays the sinister and ruthlessly ambitious Mrs Coulter in the BBC’s lavish adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. We catch up with her as series two begins to discuss the relationship with her estranged daughter Lyra, working with a digital monkey, and to ask if baddies are just more fun to play.

November marks the 25th anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act, criminalising discrimination against disabled people in many areas of life. The anniversary is being marked on BBC TV and radio with a focus on the arts. For Radio 4, Jenny Sealey, of Graeae Theatre, and Polly Thomas have directed an adaptation of a Ben Johnson play - Bartholomew Fair - reimagined as The Bartholomew Abominations, set in a dystopian future.

Two major pop acts have new releases out – longstanding international treasure Kylie Minogue and relative newcomers on the block, Little Mix. Katie Puckrik and Roisin O’Connor join John to discuss the merits (or otherwise?) of the albums and also to select a cultural highlight they’ve been enjoying recently

Fifty years ago Ted Hughes published Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. The Crow is a violent shape-shifter, a ruthless trickster who is determined to survive. A new edition of Crow has just been published and in Front Row Marina Warner, who has written the foreword, reveals the brutal beauty that Hughes achieved. The poet Zaffar Kunial reflects on how the rough music of the Songs of the Crow echoes across half a century to us today. We hear, too, from the archive, powerful readings of the poems by Ted Hughes himself.

Presenter: John Wilson