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The novelist Tom McCarthy has worked with the coders Alo Allik and Shelly Knotts to transform his Booker prize nominated novel ‘C’ (Vintage) into a sonic experience. Tom reads from the book as Alo and Shelley respond to the language to create a live, improvised soundscape. The performance is part of the ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’ series of live events marrying literature and technology, produced by Mercy and Penned in the Margins.

One of Radio 3’s New Generation Thinkers, Sandeep Parmar has edited Nancy Cunard’s ‘Selected Poems’ (Carcanet). A modernist writer whose work has largely been forgotten, Sandeep traces Nancy’s journey from a personal poet to a poet of witness, who she calls ‘a tuning fork for her generation’. Sandeep reads ‘To Eat Today’, a poem influenced by her journalism from the Spanish Civil War, from ‘Parallax’, and from a poem which explores Cunard’s relationship with T.S. Eliot.

The Linguist Lynne Murphy examines some of the ways in which both American and British English has changed in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election campaign, covering mishearings, borrowings and striking metaphors. Lynne delves into Donald Trump’s use of Anglo Saxon adjectives, and how the very British word ‘gutted’ has morphed in American hands. Lynne Murphy is a reader in Linguistics at the University of Sussex.

Steve Ely performs the latest in our series of ‘Three Score and Ten’ commissions, celebrating Radio 3’s 70th birthday. His poem ‘Little St Hugh’ takes as its starting point a myth from 1255 about the disappearance of a small boy and historical anti-semitism, and weaves in references to Ezra Pound and Hans Christian Anderson. Part of the poem has been read by the actress Leah Marks. Steve’s books are published by Smokestack.