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Award-winning writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won this year’s Pen Printer Prize. Given to a writer for an ‘unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world’ and one who shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies, Chimamanda joins Jenni.

The comedian Jo Brand left home at 16, worked as a psychiatric nurse before making it as a stand-up and becoming a regular on Have I Got News for You, QI and Bake Off: An Extra Slice. All that life experience has been squeezed into her latest book ‘Born Lippy’ and Jo joins Jenni to share what she has learnt.

Is it time the Labour Party had a woman at the helm? A theme explored in a new play at the National Theatre in London until the end of January (NT Live broadcast on 31 January to over 700 cinemas across the UK). Actor Sian Brooke talks to Jenni about her role as Pauline who enters parliament as an independent MP following a campaign to keep her local hospital open, but whose ambition doesn’t stop there.

With the centenary of some women getting the vote, we look at how a renaissance in women’s political history is changing our understanding of our recent past and of Parliament today. Nan Sloane is the former Director of the Centre for Women and Democracy and Oonagh Gay was a senior librarian in the House of Commons Library. They discuss writing about some of our earliest and forgotten women MPs.

Presenter: Jenni Murray