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What does a writer have to consider when writing about real people? And how is that question complicated when you are writing about a place and a time like Stalin’s Russia, when the concept of truth was always shifting? The novelist Julian Barnes’ new book ‘The Noise of Time’ (Cape) is about the life of the composer Shostakovich, examining the collision between art and power. Barnes is also a patron of Freedom from Torture, which helps to give people to write about their experiences of torture. On Saturday 12th December Julian Barnes and Angela Hewitt present An Evening of Words and Music at the Barbican, London in end of Freedom from Torture. More information is available

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The folk duo present songs from their new album ‘Two Wolves’ (One Little Indian). Marry tells Ian how she realised that her instrument is her voice, and how she avoids being weighed down by the weight of the folk tradition. She also explains how she finished writing ‘The Honey and the Seaweed’, a song started by her mother Lal Waterson.

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The short story writer Carys Davies won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for her collection ‘The Redemption of Galen Pike’ (Salt). For Carys, stories can often take a long time to come to fruition, the titular story first took root in her mind ten years ago. She stresses the importance of having the confidence to leave a story for as long as it needs, and the importance of the making the silences work in a short story.

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Frank McCabe is a playwright, and one of this years ‘Writersroom 10’, emerging talent who are mentored through the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Writersroom in partnership with theatres across the country. We hear Frank’s short drama ‘Tongues’, which tackles immigration and Frank explains how we see immigrants as a homogenous group, denying them humanity, and it is the purpose of drama to help us see them as distinct people.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Our last in this series of ‘Podcast Poets’ is Martin Kratz, a Manchester based poet who tackles his German heritage in his poem ‘Doggerlander’, which examines the meeting point between the two langauges and the pleasures of mistranslation. Martin is a judge on the cross-generational competition, ‘Poetry Together’, more information is available