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Radio 3's cabaret of the word presented by Ian McMillan.

This week Irish novelist Colm Toibin celebrates the life and work of Mary Lavin in her centenary year. She was born in Massachusetts and came to live with her family in the Midlands of Ireland at the age of ten. Colm knew Mary Lavin in the last fifteen years of her life and describes how she portrayed the lives of ordinary Irish women; this reflected her own life as she was widowed with three young children and supported them through her writing. She wrote at a time when her male contemporaries were more interested in the country's political struggles; and Colm says this has been a lesson to himself - to write about the human heart rather than the current climate.

Ben Okri won the 1991 Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road, but his fiction is just one aspect of what he does; he's an essayist, an aphorist, and a poet. He explains how poetry is the primary part of his writing life, and reads from his new collection, Wild, his first book of poems for thirteen years.

Helen Simpson is one of our most celebrated short story writers and she's written a new story especially for The Verb. Torremolinos is the surprising tale of two men who find themselves in the same hospital ward.

And Peter Blegvad, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, writer, and thinker presents a Verb 'eartoon' on sonic alchemy.