Jonathan Anderson was appointed as creative director of the French fashion house Dior in March 2025, becoming one of the world’s most influential designers. As creative director of the luxury label Loewe for 11 years from 2013, he led a rebranding of the Spanish company, and was hailed a critical and commercial success. He’s also run his own label JW Anderson since 2008, and launched collaborative lines with high street brands including Top Shop and Uniqlo. The recipient of many accolades since winning the Emerging Talent prize at the British Fashion Awards in 2012, he was named Designer Of The Year in 2023 and 2024.

Jonathan Anderson tells John Wilson about his rural upbringing in Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles, and the influence of his father, the former Ireland rugby team captain Willie Anderson. He recalls a childhood visit to a textiles factory run by his maternal grandfather that sparked a fascination for printed fabrics. Working as a shop window designer for the luxury label Prada led him to pursue ambitions to become a fashion designer, encouraged by Prada stylist Manuela Pavesi. Jonathan Anderson also reflects on the importance of creative freedom in his industry, claiming that the radical era of fashion, epitomised by designers such as Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, has been replaced by a fear of pushing boundaries due to the risk of social media backlash.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Jackie Kay is one of the best known and most popular Scottish literary figures. A poet and novelist, she served as Makar - the name for Scotland’s poet laureate - for five years from 2016. Since her debut poetry collection The Adoption Papers in 1991, she has published 20 works of fiction and verse for adults and children, and a memoir about meeting her biological parents called Red Dust Road. Jackie Kay was made a CBE for services to literature in 2020.

Jackie talks to John Wilson about her childhood in Glasgow as the mixed-race, adopted daughter of a loving couple. From a young age, Jackie was entranced by the parties her parents hosted in their house to raise money for the Communist Party and where they would debate and sing songs. It was her first introduction to performance and theatre. As a teenager, hearing poets such as Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead recite their own work also had a big impact on her literary aspirations.

Growing up in the Glasgow of the 60s and 70s, Jackie had very few black role models and took inspiration from the work of the African American poet Audre Lorde and the American political activist Angela Davis. Jackie also recalls finding her birth parents and how a visit to her birth father's ancestral village in Nigeria finally gave her a sense of dual identity.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Other poets who have appeared on This Cultural Life include Michael Rosen, Linton Kwesi Johnson and George The Poet, along with children’s authors including Katherine Rundell and Michael Morpurgo. You can find them in the This Cultural Life archive, which contains over 130 previous episodes.

American artist Kerry James Marshall is one of the world’s most important living painters. Marshall has been making his large-scale, vividly colourful evocations of African-American life for over 40 years. His figurative paintings are rich with symbolism, metaphor and visual references to both social history and his favourite artists from the past. A 1997 painting called Past Times, which evokes works by Seurat and Manet, sold at auction in 2018 for $21m, setting a world record for a work by a living African-American artist. In the autumn of 2025 a retrospective of his paintings opened at London's Royal Academy, his largest exhibition outside of the US.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Swedish-born Alicia Vikander won global acclaim in 2015 for playing Vera Britten in Testament Of Youth, and a humanoid robot in the thriller Ex-Machina. The following year she won an Academy Award for her supporting role with Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, along with a Screen Actors Guild Award and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Since then her diverse range of screen roles have included playing a spy boss in the film Jason Bourne, computer game heroine Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, and Gloria Steinem in the biopic The Glorias. The daughter of acclaimed stage actor Maria Fahl, she tells John Wilson how she first performed on stage at the age of seven in a musical written by Benny and Bjorn of ABBA. She also appeared in Swedish television dramas and films as a child actor. In 2025 Alicia Vikander makes her return to the stage in a new version of Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea at The Bridge in London, her first theatre role since she was a child.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Classical trumpeter Alison Balsom talks to John Wilson about the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired her career. Having recorded 17 studio albums since 2002, she has been named Gramophone Artist of the Year, won three Classical Brit Awards, along with an OBE for services to music. She has performed with leading conductors and orchestras around the world, including at the Last Night of the Proms.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Comedian, writer, musician and actor Eric Idle talks to John Wilson about his creative influences. A founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, he wrote and performed across their four television series and films, including The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. As a songwriter, he was responsible for much of the Python’s musical comedy, including Always Look on the Bright Side of Life and The Galaxy Song.

He created the comedy series Rutland Weekend Television and the Beatles parody band The Rutles, which toured and released albums. In 2005, Eric Idle created the Tony Award-winning musical Spamalot, based on the film Monty Python and The Holy Grail which, for over 20 years, has run twice in London’s West End and on Broadway and has been staged in 14 countries around the world.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Anselm Kiefer is one of the world’s greatest living artists. Born in Germany at the end of the Second World War, much of his work in paintings, sculptures and vast installation pieces, has addressed his country’s history and culture, asking difficult questions about the legacy of fascism and conflict. His paintings, thickly layered and sometimes embellished with straw or molten lead, often depict dark rutted fields or dense forests. Kiefer is renowned for the size of his work, and for his industrial-scale studio complexes in France, where he has lived for over thirty years. Kiefer's works are included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Australia. His most recent show at the Royal Academy in London has paired his works with those of one his artistic heroes for an exhibition called Kiefer/Van Gogh.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Children’s writer and academic Katherine Rundell is the multi-million selling author of adventure stories including Rooftoppers, The Wolf Wilder and The Explorer which won the Costa Children’s Book of the Year. Impossible Creatures, the first of a five book series, was named Waterstones Book Of the Year in 2023. Her biography of the 17th century poet John Donne was a non-fiction bestseller and she became the youngest ever winner of the £50,000 Bailey Gifford Prize. At the age of 36, Katherine Rundell was named author of the year at the 2024 British Book Awards.

Talking to John Wilson, Katherine Rundell recalls Saturday morning bus journeys from her home in south London to Covent Garden where her father would take part in amateur dance classes. Along the route of the 176 bus he would point out cultural landmarks and helped instil in Katherine a lifelong love for the city. She also explains how her father’s job as a civil servant took her family to live in Zimbabwe when she was a child, an experience that fuelled her imagination and fascination with the natural world. She also remembers the profound loss she felt at the death of her foster sister, and reveals that much of her writing for children has been driven by this tragedy. She chooses the Chronicles Of Narnia series of books, especially The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis as a huge influence on her own fantasy writing and the poetry of John Donne which she describes as her "greatest literary passion". Katherine also reflects on the importance of encouraging children to read and the current state of children's publishing.

Composer Steve Reich is one of the most influential musicians of modern times. In the 1960s he helped rewrite the rules of composition, using analogue tape machines to experiment with rhythm, repetition and syncopation. As the godfather of musical minimalism, his influence on Philip Glass, David Bowie, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and many other composers, has been enormous. Countless dance music producers also owe a debt to pieces including It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Different Trains and Music for 18 Musicians. His music has been performed in concert halls all around the world, and his many awards include three Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, the Polar Prize for Music and the Premium Imperiale.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Painter Jenny Saville, renowned for her large-scale portraits of fleshy, naked women, made her name soon after leaving art school when her graduation exhibition work was bought by collector Charles Saatchi. In 1997, her work was also part of the landmark Royal Academy show Sensation, alongside now iconic pieces by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others. Since then, the main focus of her work - which has been shown in museums and galleries all around the world - has remained the female form. In 2018, a Jenny Saville painting called Propped sold at auction for £9.5m, at the time a world record for a work by a living female artist. A retrospective exhibition of over 50 of her paintings and drawings is being held at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Producer: Edwina Pitman