Angélique Kidjo, often described as "the queen of African music", has recorded fifteen albums, worked with a diverse array of musical collaborators from Burna Boy and Alcia Keys to Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel, and won five Grammy Awards. In 2023 she was the recipient of the Polar Prize, regarded as one of the world’s prestigious musical awards. Born under French colonial rule in 1960 in Dahomey, Angelique first started singing professionally as a teenager. Amid violent political upheavals in the 1980s, she fled her country, which had been renamed Benin, and became an exile in Paris. It was there that she was discovered by legendary Island Record boss Chris Blackwell, who signed her to his label and launched her three decade career.

Angélique Kidjo tells John Wilson about the early influence of her mother who ran a musical theatre company in her hometown, and encouraged her to first take to the stage at the age of six. Becoming a professional singer in her teens, she recalls how she was inspired by African musicians including Fela Kuti, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. She chooses the American composer Philip Glass as another huge influence, having worked with him on Symphony 12, Glass’s reinterpretation of David Bowie’s Lodger album. Angélique also discusses her work with David Byrne and why she choose to record her own version of Remain In Light, the 1980 album by Byrne’s band Talking Heads.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

One of the world’s most acclaimed ceramicists, Edmund de Waal is renowned for simple, hand-made porcelain pots and bowls which are usually displayed in meticulously arranged groups. His work has been shown in museums and galleries including the V&A, the British Museum, the Frick in New York, and at the Venice Biennale. In 2010 Edmund de Waal became widely known as a bestselling author, after the publication of his family memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes which retraced his Jewish European heritage. A dramatic and tragic story about art, exile and survival, it led him on a journey from Tokyo to Odessa via 19th century Paris and Nazi occupied Vienna.

On This Cultural Life, Edmund de Waal tells John Wilson about being taken to a pottery class at the age of five by his father, an Anglican cleric who worked at Lincoln Cathedral. He immediately fell in love with the process of moulding wet clay into vessels and was determined to become a potter. After leaving school he spent five months in Japan studying the ancient traditions of pottery with various master ceramicists. He remembers how a visit to the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto had a huge impact on his understanding of space, contemplation and spirituality. During his first visit to Japan he also met his great uncle Ignatius Ephrussi from whom Edmund first learned about his European Jewish heritage, his family’s exile from Vienna in the face of Nazi terror, and the collection of small Japanese figurines, known as netsuke, whose story was told in The Hare With Amber Eyes.

Edmund chooses the ceramicist Lucie Rie, another Viennese exile in London, as a major influence on his practise. He describes his working routine in the ceramics studio, and how his pots are often made in response to poetry, citing the work of Romanian-born Paul Celan an American poet Emily Dickinson as particular influences.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

French Moroccan author Leïla Slimani won critical acclaim and a reputation as an author of bold & brutal fiction with her first two novels. Adele is about a bourgeoise Parisian wife and mother who lives a sexually promiscuous secret life. In Lullaby, a nanny kills the children she’s employed to care for, a story currently being adapted as a drama series starring Nicole Kidman. Leïla has also written the first two in a planned trilogy of novels based on her own family history, and has published short stories and non-fiction. She has won France’s most prestigious literary award the Prix Goncourt, and in 2017 she was appointed as President Macron’s personal representative to Francophone countries.

For This Cultural Life, Leïla Slimani tells John Wilson about her childhood in Rabat, the daughter of a prominent Moroccan economist and politician. She reveals how she was motivated to write novels after the death of her father who had been convicted of financial fraud and imprisoned, but who was posthumously cleared of any wrongdoing. She chooses her French-born maternal grandmother, who told stories to Leïla , as a formative influence on her creative imagination from a young age. Having covered the Arab Spring uprisings in Morocco and Tunisia as a journalist for Jeune Afrique magazine, Leïla discusses how news stories have inspired much of her work.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Sally Potter is a ground-breaking film-maker, best known for her bold 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Starring Tilda Swinton, it was nominated for two Academy Awards and won more than 25 international film prizes. With her 1983 debut feature The Gold Diggers, which starred Julie Christie, Sally Potter led an all-female cast and crew, establishing herself as a trailblazing figure within independent cinema. She is renowned for her radical and experimental approach to film-making. Her 2004 love story Yes was scripted entirely in iambic pentameter; Rage in 2009, set backstage at a fashion show and starring Jude Law, Steve Buscemi and Judi Dench, became the world’s first movie to premier directly on mobile phones. A multitasking filmmaker, Sally Potter’s screen credits also include actor, editor, choreographer and composer. She has written and directed nine feature films including The Party and The Roads Not Taken.

Sally Potter tells John Wilson about her upbringing in a liberal, creative household in London. She recalls how she was given a 8mm cine camera by the artist Sandy Daley when she was 14, the start of her fascination with film-making. After learning more about the craft of cinematography, processing and editing film at the London Film Cooperative, she studied dance and choreography at The Place, an experience that later inspired her 1997 film the Tango Lesson. Having recently released an album of songs, she talks about the creative impulse that inspired them. She also discusses reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the struggle to make her screen adaptation in the face of warnings from film producers that the book was ‘unfilmable’.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Actor, writer, comedian and broadcaster Stephen Fry first made his name as a comic performer as a Cambridge University undergraduate with the Footlights company. He went on to forge a television partnership with his university friend Hugh Laurie on the sketch show A Bit Of Fry and Laurie and later the comic drama series Jeeves and Wooster, adapted from the PG Wodehouse stories. Among many stage and screen roles, Stephen Fry starred as Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film Wilde, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. He received a Tony Award nomination for playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night on Broadway, and was Lord Melchett over several generations of Blackadder. He’s written five novels and three volumes of autobiography, and has presented numerous documentaries. A familiar face on British television screens, he has hosted award ceremonies and panel shows including the long-running quiz series QI.

For This Cultural Life, Stephen tells John Wilson about how he first read the Wodehouse story Very Good, Jeeves when he was 10 years old and was spellbound by the comic language. He says that seeing a film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play The Importance Of Being Earnest led him to read all of Wilde's works, beginning a lifelong obsession with the playwright. He reveals how being an avid fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels led to his expulsion from school. He also chooses E.M. Forster's 1910 novel Howard's End as a huge influence, with its central theme of 'only connect' helping him make sense of his own emotional turbulence and intellectual ambitions. He also talks about spending time in prison on remand for credit card fraud, and being diagnosed as bi-polar after prolonged struggles with his mental health.

The excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem is read by Greg Wagland.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Ian McEwan made his name in the 1970s with short stories and slim novels that explored the darker aspects of human nature. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 with his novel Amsterdam, and its follow up Atonement, was adapted as a film and nominated for several Academy Awards. McEwan primarily writes psychological dramas about relationships, but often within a global context of issues including climate change, the Iraq War and A.I. His most recent novel Lessons is his most directly autobiographical, drawing on aspects of his childhood and travels as a young man.

In conversation with John Wilson, the author recalls early memories of Libya, where his Army officer father was posted during the Suez Crisis of 1952. He says he first realised the power of poetry, especially that of Wordsworth and TS Eliot, through an English teacher at the state-funded boarding school he attended in Suffolk. He chooses, as one of his formative experiences, meeting the novelist Martin Amis and joumalist Christopher Hitchens, both of whom became lifelong friends. Other major turning points were witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as he researched a book about the Cold War, and time spent in an operating theatre watching neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen in preparation for his 2005 novel Saturday whose protagonist is a leading brain surgeon.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 and Britain’s official representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller is an unconventional artist whose work is as likely to be seen in streets or fields as in museums and galleries. In his work The Battle of Orgreave he restaged a modern civil conflict; a clash between striking miners and police officers. He persuaded a traditional brass band to play Acid House tunes in his work Acid Brass. Perhaps most memorably, on the centenary of the first day of the Battle of they Somme he conjured ghostly platoons of young soldiers all around the UK in his work We’re Here because We’re Here.

Jeremy talks to John Wilson about some of his most formative creative influences. Seeing The Who's rock musical film Tommy as a teenager was an unforgettable experience that revealed to him the power of imaginative vision. A chance encounter with one of his artist heroes Francis Bacon strengthened his interest in art history, and time spent with Andy Warhol in New York encouraged him to think of art as multi-dimensional and unlimited. He also recounts how P J Harvey's album Let England Shake and the play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth crystallised ideas he was forming about notions of Englishness which he used in both his work at the British pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and his work to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Errollyn Wallen is one of Britain's most acclaimed and widely performed contemporary composers. Born in Belize and brought up in north London, she was first ever woman to win a Ivor Novello Award for a body of work, and the first ever black woman to have a composition played at the BBC Proms. Errollyn has written 22 operas, as well as orchestral, chamber and choral works which are performed around the world. She was commissioned to write pieces to commemorate the Queen’s Golden and Diamond jubilees, and for the opening of the 2012 London Paralympic Games. She lives and works in a lighthouse in the far north of Scotland.

Errollyn tells John Wilson how, after to moving to London from Belize with her parents at a young age, she was brought up by an aunt and uncle in Tottenham. An early love of ballet led her to discover the music of Chopin, and she started to learn the piano at home. She describes the huge influence of Bach on her compositions, but also how her work is influenced by a wide range of music, from avant garde composers to jazz and funk.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

John Wilson talks to fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi. Born in the south of France, she designed for various labels before teaming up with Stephen Marks in the early 1970s to establish French Connection as a worldwide clothing brand. She launched her own label Nicole Farhi in 1982 and was one of the biggest names in UK fashion for three decades. Nicole started studying sculpture whilst still in the fashion world, and staged her first solo exhibition in 2014. She has been married to the playwright David Hare since 1992.

Nicole recalls the influence of her glamourous and well-dressed aunt Visa who sparked Nicole's early interest in fashion by taking her to the Parisian couture shows. Meeting her partner Stephen Marks proved to be a major turning point and they went on to found two successful fashion labels together. But alongside her life as a designer, Nicole also had a passion for sculpture which had been ignited seeing the work of Giacometti at the Fondation Maeght in the south of France. Her own work in clay was encouraged by the Pop Art pioneer, sculptor and printmaker Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who became her friend and mentor.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Nick Cave, the Australian born singer-songwriter and author, reveals the formative influences and experiences that have inspired his own creativity. With his band The Bad Seeds, Cave is renowned for the darkness and drama of his narrative based work. His lyrics are often populated by flawed people doing bad things, but seeking redemption in love or God, or both. His musical output is diverse, ranging from rock’n’roll, to piano-based love songs. The tragic death of his 15 year old son Arthur in 2015 has informed recent work, with songs about devastating loss, grief and love explored throughout the albums Ghosteen and Carnage. Nick Cave has also written novels, poetry, a screenplay, and has recently published Faith, Hope and Carnage - a book exploring his ideas about creativity and belief.

Nick Cave talks to John Wilson about the influences of his father, an English teacher, and his mother, a school librarian, in encouraging his love of literature from a young age. He recalls seeing The Johnny Cash Show on television at the age of 10 and being spellbound by the country music star, with whom he later worked. He also remembers the life-changing effect of hearing Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Life and Death album for the first time, and the profound influence the Canadian poet and songwriter had own his own lyrics. He reveals that fellow Australian Barry Humphries was another artist who inspired his own work, having seen a Dame Edna Everage show in Melbourne in the early 1970s. Nick Cave also discusses the impact that the death of his son had on his life, work and marriage.

Producer: Edwina Pitman