大象传媒

Alan Johnson, Pascale Petit, Hisham Matar & Peter Pomerantsev - former winners of the RSL Ondaatje Prize - join Eleanor Barraclough and an audience at the British Library to mark 15 years of the prize and discuss ways of evoking in writing the connections between the physical, cultural and personal landscapes of our lives.

Pascale Petit鈥檚 collection of poetry, Mama Amazonica, which explores motherhood, illness and pain through the foliage and creatures of the Amazon rainforest, won the 2018 Prize.
Peter Pomerantsev鈥檚 winning book in 2016, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, is a journey into the political and ethical landscape of modern Russia.
In 2013, former Home Secretary Alan Johnson won the Prize with This Boy, a visceral memoir of growing up poor in 1950s and 60s London.
Hisham Matar鈥檚 debut novel set within the highly charged political landscape of Libya, In the Country of Men, won in 2007.

2019 Ondaatje Prize shortlist as announced during the recording of this programme.

Rania Abouzeid No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (Oneworld)

Aida Edemariam The Wife鈥檚 Tale: A Personal History (4th Estate)

Aminatta Forna Happiness (Bloomsbury)

Sarah Moss Ghost Wall (Granta)

Guy Stagg The Crossway (Picador)

Adam Weymouth Kings of the Yukon: A River Journey (Particular Books)

The winner of this annual award of 拢10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place will be announced on May 13th 2019.
Find out more about the prize and the Royal Society of Literature here https://rsliterature.org/
Find the collection of Free Thinking interviews and discussions about literature here /programmes/p047v6vh

Producer: Torquil MacLeod