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Prolific romance author Jenny Colgan explains how she navigates writing romantic dialogue for repressed characters. She reads a scene from her novel ‘The Endless Beach (Sphere), where her ‘buttoned-up’ romantic hero Joel tries to navigate saying ‘I love you’. She also tells Ian about the revelation of seeing someone like herself represented on the page in Helen Fielding’s ‘Bridget Jones’.

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Kiru grew up in Nigeria reading Mills and Boon romance novels. When she returned to reading romances as an adult she realised that there was nothing to reflect her experiences as an African woman, so she decided to write her own. Kiru is a founding member of the Romance Writers of West Africa and was ‘Romance Writer of the Year’ in the 2015 Nigerian Writers Awards.

In conjunction with the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Writers Room, The Verb presents four short dramas by writers new to radio on the theme of ‘Space’. This week, we hear ‘Personal Space’, by Matthew Ingram, a play about navigating dating and romance in the online world. ‘Personal Space’ stars David Judge and James Quinn and was directed by Lorna Newman.

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Dr Jarlath Killeen teaches at Trinity College Dublin, and he began studying the romance novel when he realised that despite romance being the best-selling genre, there was very little academic attention paid to it. Jarlath takes us through the history of the romance novel from Pride and Prejudice to the present day.

We asked verb regular Kate Fox to write a new piece for us tackling the most popular dialogue from romantic films, in an every-day context. Kate explains how she discovered there is a lot more to the dialogue from romantic films than just the words…