The internationally bestselling crime writer Donna Leon talks to John Wilson about her career. Although American born, Donna is most associated with Venice, the city in which her Italian police detective protagonist, the mild-mannered family man Guido Brunetti, lives and works. She has so far written 32 novels, has sold nearly eight million copies in English, and been translated into 35 languages.

Donna Leon tells John Wilson about her love for Italy and particularly Venice, which until very recently was her home. She recalls her experiences teaching English in Saudi Arabia, and how she began her bestselling Brunetti series after a night at the opera.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Award-winning television dramatist and director Sally Wainwright talks to John Wilson about her formative cultural influences. After learning the art of screenwriting whilst working on Coronation Street, she made her name with her suburban comedy drama At Home With The Braithwaites. Her stories are usually set in the north of England including Last Tango in Halifax, and her 19th century historical series Gentleman Jack. Her most recent hit is Happy Valley, a crime drama that spanned a decade and three series, winning huge acclaim, viewing figures and multiple awards.

Sally talks about her early obsession with television, and how the 1970s musical drama Rock Follies inspired her to become a television writer at a young age. She recalls her early career writing for BBC Radio 4's The Archers and the ITV soap Coronation Street and discusses the inspirations behind some of her biggest hits.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson reveals the influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Born in Jamaica, he moved to south London in 1963 at the age of eleven. He made his name as a performance poet, reciting politically motivated verse to a dub-reggae backbeat, and becoming a powerful voice of resistance and protest in response to racism on the streets of Britain in the 1970s. He became the first black poet to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2020, and recently published a collection of prose under the title Time Come. On stage and on record, he is renowned for angry and uncompromising works such as Five Nights Of Bleeding, Sonny’s Lettah, and Iglan Is a Bitch.

For This Cultural Life, Linton Kwesi Johnson recalls growing up in poverty in rural Jamaica, where his grandmother told him ghost stories and read The Bible. Appalled at the racism he experienced, he joined the Black Panthers whilst still at school and became a political activist. He began to write and perform poetry, set to music and delivered in Jamaican patois, after being inspired by reggae artists such as Prince Buster and U-Roy, and the American group The Last Poets. Johnson also talks about the tragic fire that killed 13 young partygoers in New Cross, south London in 1981, an event that he commemorated in one of his best known works, New Craas Massahkah.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

John Wilson talks to photographer Martin Parr about the formative influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Globally renowned for his witty and satirical scenes of British life, Parr made his name in the 1970s with a series of monochrome photographs documenting the community of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. His fame grew with his 1985 project The Last Resort, which captured the spirit of the great British holiday in images of ice-cream, chips, and sunburnt bodies on the litter-strewn concrete promenade of New Brighton, Liverpool. Since then, his instantly recognisable work has examined subjects including global consumerism, mass tourism and class. He has published over a hundred books of his work, exhibited all round the world, and is regarded as one of Britain’s greatest photographers. Parr is celebrated as Master Of Photography at the 2023 Photo London fair, and has recently opened his own Foundation to exhibit the work of emerging photographers alongside his own.

Martin Parr reveals how, growing up in suburban Surrey, he was introduced to photography by his Yorkshire grandfather during holiday visits. He remembers seeing exhibitions by Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the late 1960s, but it was the work of British street photographer Tony Ray-Jones, whose images he first saw whilst studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, that was most influential. Martin Parr further developed his distinctive documentary style, and his use of saturated colour processing techniques, after seeing work by American photographer William Egglestone. Martin Parr also chooses the 1991 film Night On Earth by Jim Jarmusch as a key influence on his quirky approach to storytelling, and reflects on how his style and subjects have developed over the years.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Margaret Atwood talks to John Wilson about the formative influences and experiences that shaped her writing. One of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed authors, Atwood has published over 60 books including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She’s known for stories of human struggle against oppression and brutality, most famously her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian vision of America in which women are enslaved. She has twice won the Booker Prize For Fiction, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and again in 2019 for her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.

Growing up in remote Canadian woodland with her scientist parents, she traces her career as a story-teller back to sagas that she invented with her older brother as a child, and her first ‘novel’ written when she was seven. She recalls an opera about fabrics that she wrote and performed at high school for a home economics project, and how she staged puppet shows for children’s parties. Margaret Atwood also discusses the huge impact that reading George Orwell had on her, and how his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four especially influenced The Handmaid’s Tale. She reveals how that novel - written whilst she was living in Berlin in 1985 - was initially conceived after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan and the resurgence of evangelical right-wing politics in America.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Mexican-born filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu talks to John Wilson about his cultural influences.

Iñárritu's movies are often epic in scale and ambition. He made his name with the Mexican gangland drama Amores Perros, and won critical acclaim with his next two Hollywood movies; 21 Grams and Babel. His 2015 black comedy Birdman won him three of his five Academy Awards - for best film, best director and best screenplay. He picked up another Oscar the following year for the brutal 19th century frontiersman drama The Revenant and was awarded a Special Achievement Academy Award for his virtual reality installation Carne y Arena in 2017. His most recent movie is Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths an epic dream-like, semi-autobiographical black comedy-drama, which he co-wrote, co-composed, edited, produced, and directed.

Iñárritu reveals how working on cargo ships as a teenager later influenced the global scope of his filmmaking, and recalls his early career in the 80s and early 90s as a popular radio DJ in Mexico City. He talks about the powerful effect that the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet had on him. This collection of ten letters, published posthumously at the turn of the 20th century, advise developing a rich inner life in order to make great art, words that made a big impression on the aspiring filmmaker Iñárritu. He also discusses his love for the work of Italian film director Sergio Leone, and in particular his 1984 epic crime film Once Upon a Time in America.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

John Wilson speaks to internationally acclaimed artist Dame Rachel Whiteread about the influences on her practice as she recalls some of her most famous works. Part of the Brit Art boom of the early 1990s, Rachel was not only the first woman to win the Turner Prize but also, at 29, the youngest artist to do so. Rachel is best known for large scale sculptures cast in plaster or concrete. She made headlines with an inside-out impression of an entire terraced house in east London, and for her Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. Commissioned to make a work to stand on the empty fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, she cast the plinth itself in a huge block of translucent resin. A globally renowned artist who once represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, the work of Dame Rachel Whiteread can be found in collections, galleries and public spaces all around the world.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Musician Eliza Carthy was born into an English folk dynasty. The daughter of acclaimed folk singers Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, she joined the family business at a young age as a singer and violinist, playing with her parents as Waterson Carthy and with her mother, her aunt Lal and her cousin Marry as The Waterdaughters. As a solo artist and bandleader, Eliza has explored the roots of folk and expanded the repertoire. Awarded an MBE in 2014, she was twice nominated for the Mercury Prize for album of the year, and in 2021 became the president of the English Folk Dance and Music Society.

She tells John Wilson about the first time she attended the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 1989, aged 13. Standing on the main stage at sunset overlooking the mountains and sea was a defining moment at the start of her career. She also discusses the influence that singer Billy Bragg and Scottish folk rock band Shooglenifty had on her music. Eliza also talks about the impact of the pandemic on the folk music community and the personal loss of her mother.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Oscar-winning film-maker Damien Chazelle talks to John Wilson about his career and cultural influences.

As a child, Chazelle first started experimenting with making films using his dad’s old camcorder. After studying filmmaking at Harvard, he drew on his own experiences as a skilful jazz drummer to make his debut feature film Whiplash, about a music student and his abusive teacher. His movie La La Land, a musical in which star-crossed lovers sing and dance through the backstreets of LA, won six more Academy Awards. Damien explains how much that film owes to the Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand's 1964 romantic musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He also reveals how the Los Angeles paintings of David Hockney, and in particular his 1967 work A Bigger Splash, inspired the feel and the palate of La La Land. Chazelle's latest movie Babylon explores the birth of the film industry itself and the painful transition from silent movies to the talkies, and is inspired, in part, by the classic musical Singin' in The Rain. He also explains how his love of west coat jazz musicians including Stan Getz and Chet Baker has influenced his creative output.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

The British born musician, composer and writer Stephen Hough grew up in Cheshire, won the piano section of the very first BBC Young Musician of the Year competition as a teenager, before moving to New York to study at the Juilliard School of Music. Over the last 30 years, Stephen Hough has made more than 60 albums and is globally renowned for his thrilling live performances of a wide classical piano repertoire. Knighted in 2022 for services to music, he is also a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music, holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester, and is a member of the faculty at The Juilliard School.

Stephen talks to John Wilson about some of the most important influences on his musical career, starting with a 1962 LP called Keyboard Giants of the Past. This compilation album, bought for him just after he started to learn the piano aged 6, included artists from the earliest days of recording such as Ignace Paderewski, Vladimir de Pachmann and Sergei Rachmaninoff, all of whom inspired him with their rich artistry and individual styles.

Producer: Edwina Pitman