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大象传媒 Reith Lectures 2022 鈥� The Four Freedoms

Four speakers will feature in this year’s 大象传媒 Radio 4 Reith Lectures: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lord Rowan Williams Darren McGarvey and Dr Fiona Hill will deliver lectures inspired by Franklin D Roosevelt’s famous "Four Freedoms" speech. Each speaker will explore one of Roosevelt's themes: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

The series of lectures will be recorded in London, Glasgow, Wales and Washington DC in late October and November. They will be broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service towards the end of the year and will be available on 大象传媒 Sounds.

The lectures will be chaired by presenter, journalist and author, Anita Anand.

(Clockwise from top left) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lord Rowan Williams (photo: Paul Rogers), Dr Fiona Hill, Darren McGarvey (photo: © Andrew Cawley)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will explore freedom of speech in her lecture. Born in Nigeria in 1977, Adichie is a multi-award winning author. Her 2013 novel Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013.

In November 2020, Half of a Yellow Sun was voted by the public to be the best book to have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history. Her 2012 TEDx Euston talk We Should All Be Feminists started a worldwide conversation about feminism and was published as a book in 2014.

She was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015, and in 2017 Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.

Lord Rowan Williams

Lord Rowan Williams will explore freedom of worship in his lecture. He will discuss how religious freedom is the basis of political freedom, as well as the current state of religious freedom around the world. Rowan Douglas Williams is a bishop, theologian and poet.

He was born in Swansea, south Wales in 1950, into a Welsh-speaking family. Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, a position he held from December 2002 to December 2012.

From 2012 to 2020, he was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and chair of the international development charity, Christian Aid. He continues to write on cultural and political issues for the New Statesman.

Darren McGarvey

Darren McGarvey will explore freedom from want in his lecture. He will discuss themes of inequality and poverty, and of personal responsibility and system change. McGarvey is the Orwell Prize-winning author of Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass, and The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain.

As his critically-acclaimed musical alter-ego Loki, McGarvey is one of Scotland’s most influential urban music artists.

His recent works include Government Issue Music Protest and Trigger Warning; two interconnected conceptual albums exploring themes of identity, class and nationalism.

Mohit Bakaya, controller, 大象传媒 Radio 4

“Freedom is one of the defining values of our age. It is the fault line drawn in so many of our contemporary debates about the nature of society and the kind of world we want to live in. In this 大象传媒 centenary year, I wanted to seek out four perspectives on this complex idea based on FDR's famous Four Freedoms speech – a speech made in 1941 at such a precarious moment for the world. I’m delighted that these four brilliant thinkers have agreed to explore freedom as it relates to their areas of passion and knowledge."

Dr Fiona Hill

Dr Fiona Hill will explore freedom from fear in her lecture. 1922 welcomed the birth of the 大象传媒, but it was also the year that marked the creation of Soviet Ukraine (following the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917-1921), and a year which saw a rise in organised working class movements. Hill will draw upon this time in history, and discuss how knowledge can help us allay our fears and better understand the world.

Fiona Hill is a foreign affairs specialist originally from Bishop Auckland, County Durham, who advised Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In 2017 she joined the National Security Council at the White House as deputy assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia. She left the administration in 2019 and later that year testified to the US Congress as a witness in the hearings which led up to Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020.

About The Reith Lectures


The Reith Lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the 大象传媒 to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation's first director-general.

John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the 大象传媒 each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.

The very first Reith lecturer was the philosopher, Bertrand Russell who spoke on Authority and the Individual. Among his successors were Robert Oppenheimer (Science and the Common Understanding, 1953) and J.K. Galbraith (The New Industrial State, 1966). The Reith Lectures have also been delivered by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks (The Persistence of Faith, 1990), Onora O’Neill (A Question of Trust, 2002), Daniel Barenboim (In The Beginning Was Sound, 2006) and Michael Sandel (A New Citizenship, 2009). Most recently the Reith Lecturers have been Stephen Hawking (Black Holes, 2016), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Mistaken Identities, 2016), Hilary Mantel (Resurrection: The Art And Craft, 2017), Margaret MacMillan (The Mark of Cain, 2018), Jonathan Sumption (Law and the Decline of Politics, 2019), Mark Carney (How We Get What We Value, 2020) and Stuart Russell (Living With Artificial Intelligence, 2021).

The Reith Archive is available here.

The Reith Lectures on 大象传媒 Radio 4