Main content

What do we mean by 'Working Class Writing'?

Novelists Kit de Waal and Adelle Stripe, TV, theatre and radio writer Michael Chaplin and author, rapper and winner of this year's Orwell Prize Darren McGarvey with Shahidha Bari.

Kit de Waal, Darren McGarvey, Adelle Stripe and Michael Chaplin join Shahidha Bari to examine what we mean by 'working class writing'. Crowd funding has helped bring a new generation of authors into print but is this because mainstream publishing has neglected diverse voices? What experiences do we want to see on the page and stage? Recorded at Sage Gateshead.

Kit de Waal's short stories include "Crushing Big", "I am the Painter's Daughter" and "The Beautiful Thing" - which was broadcast on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award 2016. De Waal used some of her advance for My Name Is Leon to found the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Fellowship to improve working-class representation in the arts. Her new novel is called The Trick To Time.

Darren McGarvey, author of Poverty Safari, is also known as Loki, a Scottish hip-hop artist, writer and community activist. Darren was rapper-in-residence at Police Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit.

Adelle Stripe and written 3 collections of poetry and her debut novel Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile is inspired by the life and work of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. It was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and received the K Blundell Trust Award for Fiction.

Michael Chaplin has written extensively for TV, radio and theatre. A journalist, TV documentary producer and executive and now full time writer, he created the TV series Grafters and Monarch of the Glen and has written 8 theatre plays and numerous works for radio including Two Pipe Problems and Tommies. He is also the editor of Hame, a collection of essays, short stories and poems by his father Sid Chaplin, the acclaimed writer whose works are mostly set in the North East.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Available now

44 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Wed 4 Apr 2018 22:00
  • Thu 23 Aug 2018 22:15

Featured in...

Free Thinking Festival 2018

Free Thinking Festival 2018

Leading thinkers come together to debate and share new ideas, music and performance.

Should we stop having children?

With global population on the rise, could having kids be your biggest moral mistake?

Are we more lonely than our ancestors?

Professor Barbara Taylor explores the history of solitude. Have we always been in crisis?

Seven life lessons from a modern-day hermit

Could more of us benefit from a healthy dose of solitude?

The Arts & Ideas Podcast

The Arts & Ideas Podcast

You can download all the past episodes of Radio 3's Free Thinking

Discussions and talks from the Free Thinking Festival 2019

Discussions and talks from the Free Thinking Festival 2019

Angry politics, what we can’t say, being diplomatic, weeping, emotion in music, film & TV

Click to listen to discussions, talks and music as the Free Thinking Festival 2019 Gets Emotional

Click to listen to discussions, talks and music as the Free Thinking Festival 2019 Gets Emotional

Angry politics, what we can’t say, being diplomatic, weeping, emotion in music, film & TV

CLICK to LISTEN & SEE programmes from the Free Thinking Festival 2018: The One & the Many

CLICK to LISTEN & SEE programmes from the Free Thinking Festival 2018: The One & the Many

We examine the fast-changing relationship between the individual & the crowd

CLICK to LISTEN & SEE all programmes, images, clips & features from 2017's festival

Free Thinking Festival 2017: The Speed of Life