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Jonathan Coe is the acclaimed author of ‘The House of Sleep’, ‘The Rotter’s Club’, and ‘The Closed Circle’. His books often cover serious political themes, but always funny. His latest book is ‘Expo ‘58’ (Penguin), a comic novel set in a ‘British’ pub in the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. Jonathan tells Ian about the books and films which helped him get back to 1958, and the difficulties of getting comic exaggeration just right. Jonathan has also written a title for the upcoming Save the Story series (Pushkin Press) in which adult writers re-imagine adult tales for children. Jonathan has chosen Gulliver’s Travels.

Matthew Welton’s previous poetry collection ‘We Needed Coffee…’ has a full title that is 100 words long. Matthew is here with his work in progress, a set of 12 line poems which beguile the reader with possible patterns, and are designed to be read in any order. He tells us about the importance of notebooks to his poetry, and what his poems have in common with bread-making.

What about the people we don’t listen to? This is the question that Chris Goode asked himself when he came up with Monkey Bars, a piece of verbatim theatre featuring adult actors in adult situations, speaking the words of children. Christian Roe performs an extract from the piece, which forces us to listen to what children are trying to tell us.

 Monkey Bars is on tour. .  

The singer songwriter Beccy Owen is active in community music theatre and is the lead singer of the alternative pop-band Sharks Took the Rest. Beccy is in The Verb studio to preview her new solo material. She performs ‘You Can’t Afford To Feel It’, a song written as part of a strict timetable to write a song a day for a month. Her new album, Imago is out in December.