This week The Verb offers you another chance to hear a special extended interview with Zadie Smith. Her audacious first book 'White Teeth', written when she was just 24, was one of the most talked about debut novels of all time. Most of Smith's novels take place in north west London, where she grew up, and which she has described as the location of her imagination, and her heart. In her latest novel 'The Fraud', also set in the area, Smith moves into historical fiction with a story inspired by an extraordinary real life court case.

Presenter: Ian McMillan

First Broadcast 13 Oct 2023

On International Women's Day Ian McMillan is joined by poets Joelle Taylor, Rommi Smith, Kim Moore and Shirley May to explore how women poets are using poetry and writing to explore and challenge sexism and to empower women through words. There's also music from soul singer, Sarah-Jane Morris, and musician, Tony Remy, from their new album 'Sisterhood'.

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ practise notebooks, pianist Stephen Hough’s account of tackling Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, the voice of Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny in the words of Scottish poet Don Paterson, and E. M. Forster’s evocation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in Howard’s End: just some of the texts we’ll hear on tonight’s celebration of writing about music.

Ian’s joined by four Radio 3 presenters to discuss the challenges of all sorts of music writing, from concert reviews to programme notes, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and scripts for radio. His guests are Essential Classics Georgia Mann who pored over Oasis reviews in the N.M.E. in her teens, Hannah French from The Early Music Show who once read a biography of Pablo Casals in a day, Composer of the Week’s Kate Molleson who started out writing concert reviews at University in Montreal, and Corey Mwamba who presents Freeness and immersed himself in jazz books at Southampton library whilst doing his A-Levels.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

This week it’s the ‘cabaret of cuteness’ as this week Ian McMillan and his guests examine all things small, fluffy, wide eyed and sleepy in The Cute Verb. Ian is joined by poet Isabel Galleymore who reads from her new collection Baby Schema which asks what we ask cuteness to do for us and follows Mickey Mouse’s journey towards cuteness across the past one hundred years. Tom Morton Smith wrote the smash-hit RSC adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro, here he helps us consider being cute as well as being big, noisy, smelly, and a little bit scary. Karen McCarthy Woolf’s new experimental verse novel is ‘Top Doll’, a story told by a chorus of cute and not so cute dolls. And finally Kate Fox imagines a meet-cute between a cute creature and a not so cute one – can cute be an eco-strategy?

Presenter: Ian McMillan

The World in Words. The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan, revisits the Contains Strong Language which was held in Leeds in September of last year. It was a gathering of poets from all over the world and featured Felene Cayetano from Belize, Andre Bagoo from Trinidad and Tobago, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo from Kenya, Lebo Mashile from South Africa, Chris Tse, the Poet Laurete of New Zealand, Ramya Jirasinghe from Sri Lanka and Titilope Sonuga.

This edition of the verb is a celebration of the physical - everything from mountain climbing, human desire, a mother's touch or the act of writing. The poet Helen Mort writes in her head, while running, climbing and she even wrote one whilst in labour. She tells Ian about her new collection The Illustrated Woman - inspired by what she calls a "pain epiphany" while being tattooed - and how her poems "spookily" prefigure her life.

The Norfolk born writer Jon Ransom wrote The Whale Tattoo, which won the Polari first book award, on his phone on the bus. His new novel The Gallopers opens in the aftermath of the 1953 North Sea flood where 19-year-old Eli yearns for Jimmy Smart, the handsome older fairground worker his aunt has taken in.

And award-winning poet Victoria Kennefick has written on the back of her child's drawings and on shop receipts when an idea urgently strikes. She tells Ian McMillan about her collection Egg/Shell, inspired by a lockdown encounter with a swan whose eggs wouldn't hatch.

Produced in Salford by Olive Clancy.

The Verb goes back to the brilliant Contains Strong Language Festival held in September last year in Leeds to consider the poetics of rap, rhyme and flows with a celebration of 50 years of hip hop. Rapper and playwright, and friend of The Verb, Testament led a panel discussion on one of the 20th and 21st century’s most powerful and influential literary movement with guests UK rapper Jehst, writer and spoken word performer Michelle Scally Clarke, and hip hop luminary Paul 'Oddball' Edmeade.

Ian McMillan presents a special extended interview with writer and novelist Tessa Hadley. Tessa Hadley's books are admired for the flowing, thoughtful intensity of her prose; and she is a master of capturing the humanity of domestic lives and the quietly devastating drama of the everyday. Hadley is a writer with a keen eye for the telling detail and a gift for bringing everything she has, sees and knows about life to the characters she creates. Her first novel was published when she was 46 and since then she has written short stories as well as novels.

Producer: Cecile Wright

Ian McMillan presents a celebration of remarkable poets and poetry readings from one of the major events in the poetry calendar: the TS Eliot Prize Readings at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The prize is awarded annually by the TS Eliot Foundation for the best collection of the year. The winning book Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant also won the 2023 Forward Prize.

Ian McMillan is looking at, and listening to, the wonderfully different ways we use language with three poets: Daljit Nagra whose new collection Indiom celebrates language in more than forty different poetic forms; Nasser Hussain whose poems take us deep into individual words often creating patterns so that build something new, and Safiya Kamaria Kinshas; a poet, dancer and choreographer whose work weaves together dance and poetry on the page and stage. And we’ve also got one of our new Verb Audio Dramas made in collaboration with BBC Writers and the BBC Audio Drama North team: No Smoking In The Ground by Matthew Smith.

Producer: Cecile Wright