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Ian McMillan presents Radio 3's 'Cabaret of the Word', celebrating the writing of mid-life, with guests Sharon Olds, Kathleen Jamie, Alain de Botton and Paul Taylor.

1.The Poetry of Mid-life
Sharon Olds has been celebrated for the 'chivalry and grace' she showed in poems from her latest collection 'Stag's Leap', which was awarded the T.S.Eliot Prize. Her work explores the difficulty of remaking the self in mid-life, after the break-up of a long marriage. Sharon reads three poems for The Verb, and talks about the origin of the astonishing images she found for the experience of separation.

Essayist and poet Kathleen Jamie reads from her new collection 'The Overhaul' (Picador) which won this year's Costa Poetry Prize. She talks to Ian about the way in which her book relates to the experience of mid-life and the writing process, how both can feel like a 'waiting game'. Kathleen also talks about the importance of 'listening' for poems rather than 'finding a voice'.

2.Writing the Mid-life Crisis
Paul Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Communications at Leeds University, whose most recent publication is 'Zizek and the Media' (Polity Press), philosopher and writer Alain de Botton has just published 'Religion for Atheists' (Penguin). Together they discuss the language of the male mid-life crisis, its place in our culture, and whether contemporary writers have a responsibility to explore kindness, virtue and sacrifice in mid-life as well as relationship breakdown.