Podcast appearances and mentions of william fiennes

For this episode I spoke to American writer Jo Ann Beard about her latest collection Festival Days and her previous collection The Boys of My Youth. We talked about fact, fiction, creative writing, journalism, how her experience of a workplace shooting in which people died changed her writing career, writing for the New Yorker, writing about death or proximity to death, how she feels about using people's stories, and how she constructs her work piece by piece, very, very slowly.I found out about Jo Ann's work from William Fiennes, who told me about an essay called The Fourth State of Matter, which is included in The Boys of My Youth and was published by the New Yorker. Here is a link to that essay:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matterYou can buy Festival Days here:https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/festival-days-jo-ann-beard/5000893?ean=9780316497220You can buy The Boys of My Youth here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boys-My-Youth-Ann-Beard/dp/0316085251She recommended Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mothers-Sparta-Memoir-Dawn-Davies/dp/125013370XThe other book she recommended was The Tender Land by Kathleen Finneran:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tender-Land-Family-Love-Story/dp/0618340742Finally, you can buy my books here:https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/andrew-hankinsonThank you for listening.

In an ongoing collaboration with BBC Radio 3, Wellcome Collection's Reading Room is the setting for a series of 'The Essay' devoted to the bodily organs. 'Body of Essays' invites five writers to ruminate on a different organ of the body. This strange proposition has a mysterious allure: the organs are hidden, buried from view, and yet are at the very core of our physical functioning as well as our mental and emotional world. Suctioned together in dark flesh, the organs can be all the more puzzling and intriguing. William Fiennes is recipient of the Hawthornden Prize and Somerset Maugham Award for his book The Snow Geese, and more recently a tender account of growing up in the family estate with his epileptic brother Richard in The Music Room. A sufferer of Crohn's disease, William focuses on his bowel.

Horizon: Tim Dee & William Fiennes in conversation with Sam Guglani

William Fiennes, John Carey, Bob Heath, Ray Tallis and Christopher Potter in discussion with Sam Guglani.

William Fiennes on founding the charity First Story, and his passion to foster creativity and literacy. The charity runs writing workshops in schools across the country, hoping to encourage that revelatory process of 'finding one's own voice.' Fiennes thinks that we all have our own unique voice, and he quotes Pullman on the importance of discovering it: "Real writing can liberate and strengthen young people's sense of themselves as almost nothing else can." William Fiennes is the bestselling author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room. Recorded live in London at 5x15 in 2014. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

On Start the Week Anne McElvoy talks to the environmental campaigner Tony Juniper about putting a price on nature, and reframing the importance of the natural world in terms of finance. But the writer William Fiennes believes it's the imagination and not discussion of dividends and capital that will inspire the next generation, and Ngaire Woods argues that governments and business should be run by goals and values, and not the balance sheet. The Tory MP, John Penrose, looks at whether we should be doing more to protect city skylines and townscapes. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Poet James Fenton; John Morton, creator of the TV comedy Twenty Twelve; Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis; author Nicola Barker; William Fiennes on Joseph Mitchell; crime writer Andrea Camilleri.

With Kirsty Lang. Singers Amy Winehouse and Katy Perry are the focus of two new documentaries. Katy Perry: Part of Me follows the American performer on tour, as her marriage to Russell Brand was ending. Amy Winehouse - the Day She Came to Dingle includes footage of the late singer performing in a small Irish church in 2006. Mark Frith reviews. Singer Sam Lee gave up being a visual artist, a teacher of wilderness survival skills and a burlesque dancer, to learn folk songs. He talks about collecting material from gypsy and traveller communities for his CD, Ground of its Own, and the sounds - including birdsong and drones - that he has added to his interpretations. As Damien Hirst announces plans to erect a 20-metre statue of a pregnant woman in Ilfracombe, and London City Airport unveils what is claimed to be the UK's tallest bronze sculpture, art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston considers the continuing appeal of large-scale art. Salman Rushdie has described the American writer Joseph Mitchell as a 'buried treasure'. Working on the New Yorker from 1938 until his death in 1996, he specialized in portraits of eccentrics, workers, bohemians and their haunts. As a new edition of Mitchell's writings is published, writer William Fiennes and Janet Groth, receptionist at the New Yorker and a long-standing friend, reflect on why his work deserves a wider audience. Producer Philippa Ritchie.

James Naughtie and readers talk to William Fiennes about his memoir The Music Room. The book is his account of growing up in a castle with an epileptic brother. It's an honest yet discrete story of a fascinating family and how they deal with the eldest brother's struggle with epilepsy. In his upbeat moments, Richard brims with tenderness and high spirits, and at his worst he is threatening and even violent. Richard dies of a seizure at forty-one; his life defined by damage done to his brain by his epilepsy. The book is potted with medical histories of epilepsy alongside anecdotes about the film crews, country fairs and conventions that dominated daily life for Fiennes' family in the castle. Twelve thousand visitors passed through the castle every year - giving, he says, new meaning to the phrase 'tidy your room. But the book is also a testament of a family's love for their ill and sometimes difficult son. William talks about his family story and the result is an unforgettable picture of the disordered world that he experiences through his brother, set in an ancient house where the music room of the title is the place where he sought refuge and enjoyed playing as a child. August's Bookclub choice : 'Death at La Fenice' by Donna Leon. Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to American writer Nicole Krauss, shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize. Our chosen novel is her critically acclaimed The History of Love. It's a complex tale of loss - a lost manuscript, lost homelands, characters grieving for lost loved ones. There are four separate narrators who are all drawn to the lost book - also called The History of Love. Leo Gursky is at the end of his life, tapping his radiator each evening to let his neighbour know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the local coffee bar. He doesn't want to die on a day when no-one has seen him. As a young man Leo wrote The History of Love in pre-war Poland. Although he doesn't know it, the book also survived, crossing oceans and generations and changing lives. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that book, and lives across New York City from Leo. She and her little brother, who thinks he is the Messiah, are recovering from the loss of their father. The starting point for writing the novel was the story of her grandmother, who came to England as a chaperone on the Kindertransport, and lost all her family in the Holocaust. She had fallen in love with a young doctor, whom she had also presumed dead. Forty years later, he wrote to her grandmother from South America. Nicole's History of Love is like a jigsaw, where all the pieces come together at the end - and she talks about how she has no preconceived idea about where the story will end as she begins. Nicole likens it to being a traveller in a foreign city, walking from street to street, finding her way. July's Bookclub choice : 'The Music Room' by William Fiennes. Producer : Dymphna Flynn.