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

Errollyn Wallen

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Zadie Smith grew up in north west London and studied English at Cambridge University. After a publisher’s bidding war when she was just 21, her debut novel White Teeth became a huge critical and commercial hit on publication in 2000 and won several awards including the Orange Prize, now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread first novel award. Since then, with books including On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the world’s most successful and popular living novelists, renowned for her witty dialogue and explorations of cultural identity, class and sexuality. Her most recent book The Fraud is her first historical novel.     Zadie Smith talks to John Wilson about her upbringing in Willesden, North West London, with her Jamaican born mother and white English father. She chooses C S Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as an early formative influence and remembers how its themes of danger, power and betrayal were intoxicating to her as a young reader.  Zadie talks about the creative influence of her husband, the poet Nick Laird, and of the cultural impact of a trip she made to west Africa in 2007 which inspired much of her 2016 novel Swing Time. She also reflects on her role as an essayist who in recent years, has increasingly written about global political and social issues. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Zadie Smith

Renowned for the autobiographical candour of her lyrics, Lily Allen has sung about the pitfalls of fame, drugs, broken relationships and motherhood. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her debut album Alright Still and after the release of It’s Not Me, It’s You in 2010 won a Brit Award and three Ivor Novello Awards, including Songwriter of the Year.  In 2021 she embarked on a stage acting career starring in 2.22 A Ghost Story, for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award. More recently, with her childhood friend Miquita Oliver, she launched her BBC podcast series Miss Me. Talking to John Wilson, Lily recalls a sometimes sad and troubled childhood. Her father, the actor and comedian Keith Allen, had left the family home when she was four, and her film producer mother Alison Owen was often away working. She chooses as her first formative experiences a school concert in which she performed the song Baby Mine from the Disney movie Dumbo and captivated the audience. She recalls how the first started writing and recording her own songs, and built up a fanbase with the on-line platform MySpace. She chooses, as key musical influences the 1979 song Up The Junction by Squeeze, and the 2004 album A Grand Don’t Come For Free by Mike Skinner, otherwise known as The Streets. Lily Allen also reflects on the pressures of juggling life in the spotlight with motherhood, and how theatre acting has offered her a new creative challenge. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Lily Allen

The work of composer and conductor John Adams blends the rhythmic vitality of Minimalism with late-Romantic orchestral harmonies. He emerged alongside Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other musical minimalists in the early 1970s, and his reputation grew with symphonic work and operas that tackle recent history including Nixon In China, the Death Of Klinghoffer and Dr Atomic. He is the winner of five Grammy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and is one of America’s greatest and most performed living composers.  Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. He began composing at the age of ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager. He tells John Wilson about the huge influence the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his televised Young People's Concerts had on him. He also reveals how jazz band leader and composer Duke Ellington influenced how he writes for the orchestra, and how Charles Dickens inspired him to embrace accessibly in his compositions. Producer: Edwina Pitman Extract from Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concert, What Does Music Mean? CBS, 18 January 1958, © The Leonard Bernstein Office

John Adams

Irish novelist Anne Enright is the author of seven novels, including The Gathering, winner of the Booker Prize in 2007. Her 2012 novel The Forgotten Waltz won the Andre Carnegie Medal for Fiction and her novel The Green Road won The Irish Novel of the Year in 2015, the same year that she was appointed as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest novel The Wren, The Wren has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024. Anne tells John Wilson how her childhood home in the suburbs of Dublin, and holidays spent at the Pollock Holes in Kilkee inform her writing. She recalls her book-devouring household and first reading Ulysses while on a cycling holiday at the age of 14. The play Top Girls by Caryl Churchill was also a creative influence, particularly in the way  Churchill wrote dialogue for women who were at the time, so underrepresented on stage. Anne also cites the influence of the writer Angela Carter, both as a writer of contemporary fiction and as her tutor and mentor at the University of East Anglia.  Producer: Edwina Pitman Archive and readings used: Extract from The Gathering, read by Anne Enright
Extract from The Wren, The Wren, read by Charlotte Pyke
Extract from Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, BBC, 1992

Anne Enright

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is best known for his captivating black and white photographs. He has documented scenes of hardship and desperation in times of war and famine; he has explored global labour and migration; and he has captured the wonders of the natural world. Salgado has worked in more than 120 countries over the last 50 years, and is now regarded as one of the all time greats of photography. His images are in the collections of museums and galleries around the world, he won the prestigious Premium Imperiale arts prize in 2021 and was the 2024 recipient of the Sony World Photography Award for outstanding achievement. Raised on this a cattle farm in eastern Minas Gerais state, an early formative experience was leaving home for the city of Vitória in 1960. It was here, watching ships dock from all around the world, that he first felt the desire to travel. It's also where he met his wife Lélia who is his curator and editor. He began a promising career as an economist but switched to photography in the early 1970s, after he and Lélia bought their first camera on holiday. Joining the Magnum agency, the international cooperative of photographers, in 1979 allowed him to refine his craft with the help and advice of photography greats such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Salgado tells John Wilson about some of his most famous photo series, including those on the theme of manual labour which he called Workers; and Exodus, the stories of global migration. Covering the Rwandan genocide in 1994 as well as years of photographing refugees from wars, natural disasters and poverty finally took its toll on Salgado's health. He stopped photographing and returned to Brazil, where he and Lélia began reforesting his father's farm, now transformed into a National Park of lush vegetation called Instituto Terra. The success of this venture led to Salgado returning to photography, this time seeking out beauty and landscapes in series called Genesis, his love letter to the planet.  Producer: Edwina Pitman

Errollyn Wallen

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