In this week's podcast, we explore the relationship between landscape and literature in the UK. The British Library's Writing Britain exhibition opens today, and we take a tour round the books and artworks with curators Jamie Andrews and Tanya Kirk, moving from the moors of the Brontës to JG Ballard's suburbia. We chart the growth of the urban landscape as well, beautifully characterised in Bernard Kops's poem, Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East, and take a sneak peek at the Fay Godwin photographs that inspired the poems in Elmet, Ted Hughes's collection of poems about the Calder Valley in Yorkshire. We finish by dabbling our feet in the UK's water writing, accompanied by the splash and gurgle of Graham Swift's Waterland and Alice Oswald's riverine poem, Dart.
Reading list
Writing Britain by Christina Hardyment (British Library)
Pin-a-Tale map (British Library)
Elmet by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin (Faber)
Waterland by Graham Swift (Picador)
Dart by Alice Oswald (Faber)
