Margaret Atwood is widely acclaimed as Canada’s most eminent novelist, poet and critic. Her books, among them The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye, have earned her enormous respect and numerous awards in the literary world. She is noted for her deep understanding of human behaviour, a beautifully understated style and a tremendously broad scope. Interviewed in and around her home in Toronto, Atwood talks about her writing in a programme which focuses on her book The Robber Bride.
Lynda La Plante
Lynda La Plante is Britain’s most prolific television screenwriter, creator of hard-hitting series such as Widows, Civvies and Framed, Comics and the British Academy and Emmy Award-winning Prime Suspect. Her dramas are gutsy, uncompromising and meticulously accurate. This programme follows La Plante as she researches those areas which have come to characterise her writing: the criminal underworld, police culture, and London low-life.
Salman Rushdie
This exclusive interview with writer Salman Rushdie was the first television broadcast he made after going into hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy. It coincided with the publication of his novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his young son. He talks frankly about his experiences and about his life and work, which is illustrated with readings and dramatisations.
Martin Amis
Noted for his provocative, dark comedies, satirising the more grotesque aspects of modern urban life, Martin Amis is the leading British novelist of his generation. In this profile, he reads from his book, London Fields, and explains how the onset of what he describes as “early middle age” changed his outlook on tife and death.