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Thomas Keneally, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary and Alexander Linklater on Eric Linklater

Mariella Frostrup talks to the novelist Thomas Keneally, who, in a new memoir, recalls the writing of his 1982 novel Schindler's Ark.

Searching for Schindler
Thomas Keneally won the 1982 Booker Prize for his novel Schindler's Ark, a fictional retelling of the story of the German industrialist who saved more than a thousand of his Jewish workers from the death camps. Now he's written a memoir which recalls the writing of the book, and in particular his friendship with Leopold Pfefferberg, one of the Schindler Jews. He talks to Mariella about the meeting which led to the book, and reveals the crisis writing it caused him.

Reading the Oxford English Dictionary
Mariella meets the man who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary - all twenty volumes and 21,730 pages of it. Ammon Shea explains why he did it, and what he learned; and another dictionary enthusiast, Simon Winchester, explains the beauty of the OED.

Linklater on Linklater
Alexander Linklater, the deputy editor of Prospect magazine, joins Mariella to discuss the work of his grandfather, the novelist Eric Linklater. On the eve of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Linklater arrived in America on a travel scholarship. Two years later he published his response to living through the early years of the Depression and the spectre of Prohibition, the novel Juan in America. Alexander Linklater explains the book's appeal.

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30 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Sun 19 Oct 2008 16:00
  • Thu 23 Oct 2008 16:00

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