The Essay

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region.

R.M. Francis is sharing the secret world of Wren’s Nest in Dudley. Once a site of intense mining, this was the UK’s first urban nature reserve. It’s world-famous geologically for its well-preserved Silurian coral reef fossils and is considered the most diverse and abundant fossil site in the British Isles. Surrounded by council houses, takeaways, pubs and supermarkets, Wren’s Nest is a very surprising place.

RM Francis is a writer from the Black Country. He’s a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and is currently the poet in residence for the Black Country Geological Society. He's the author of five poetry Chapbook collections plus novels and novellas.

Producer: Rosie Boulton

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region.

Brendan Hawthorne is revealing his hidden childhood world of Tipton. Think cooling towers, high-rise flats, scrapyard cranes and angel fish in the canal.

Brendan is a poet, playwright, writer and musician who was born in Tipton in the Black Country. He’s released five collections of poetry and had two plays produced locally. He stood on Antony Gormley's Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and appeared on BBC One's The One Show, translating Shirley Bassey lyrics into Black Country dialect to the Dame herself! Brendan is Poet Laureate of Wednesbury, his adopted home town.

Producer: Rosie Boulton

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Emma Purshouse is introducing a new visitor to St Barts Church which stands on the hill in Wednesbury. Think cock fights, an unimpeded wind from the Urals and orange chips.

Emma was born in Wolverhampton and is a freelance writer, novelist and performance poet. She’s a poetry slam champion and performs regularly at spoken word nights including at The Cheltenham Literature Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Shambala, Womad, Latitude and Solfest. She was Wolverhampton’s first Poet Laureate.

Producer: Rosie Boulton

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Poet Liz Berry is taking a nighttime drive to the top of a hill in the Black Country to visit the ghosts of her childhood in Sedgley.

Liz’s first book of poems, Black Country, a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’ (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Liz's pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. In her latest book, The Home Child, a novel in verse, Liz reimagines the story of her great aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly migrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant schemes.

Producer: Rosie Boulton

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes.

In this final essay of the series, Geoff Dyer retraces a pilgrimage to New Mexico, where DH Lawrence’s ashes were supposedly built into a concrete shrine near Taos at the request of his estranged wife Frieda. But were they actually his ashes?

Dyer is a multi-award winning novelist and non-fiction writer. His many books include Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence, and his latest The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings, which was published in 2022.

Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes.

Today Brandon Taylor travels uptown through a racially-charged Manhattan to Harlem, where Langston Hughes is buried in a library - literally underneath his prophetic words.

Taylor is a New York-based fiction writer and essayist originally from Alabama. His novels include the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and The Late Americans, and he has also published a widely-praised short story collection, Filthy Animals.

Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes.

Today Helen Mort ventures up a Yorkshire hill to find Sylvia Plath’s much-vandalised gravestone, a battleground for those claiming the American poet's contested legacy.

Born in Sheffield, Mort is an award-winning poet and novelist.

Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes.

Today Tracy Chevalier strolls to Stinsford, the Dorset village where Thomas Hardy’s heart is poetically buried separately from his body at Poets' Corner, Westminster – echoing the writer’s divided self.

Chevalier was born in America but now lives in Hardy's beloved home county, Dorset. She has written 12novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring which was adapted into a film of the same name, and most recently The Glassmaker.

Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes.

Today in the first essay of a new series, Naomi Alderman goes in search of Mary Wollstonecraft's tomb in Old St Pancras churchyard - reputedly the spot where, among other things, Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley learnt to write. She sheds light on the life of this important feminist pioneer, offering a moving personal reflection on mother-daughter relationships.

Alderman is an award-winning author whose books include Disobedience and The Power, recently adapted into a nine-part TV series.

Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England.

The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go from the Russia, Persia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Americas, making their homes and careers here, and in the process transforming the nature of early English culture and society. This series tells the stories of ten individuals that reveal a very different story of the Tudor period as a time of multicultural exchange, encounter and ordinary working people living alongside each other.

10. Emilia Lanyer

Presenter Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London

Producer Mark Rickards

A Whistledown Scotland production