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Sophie Coulombeau, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, writer and lecturer in English literature at the University of York, reflects on the contemporary reluctance to face death. Accompanied by funeral director Christine Dudzinska and Clive Dawson, cemetery volunteer, she visits the plot she has purchased in the atmospheric and historic cemetery in York that will be her final resting place - an unusual act of forward planning in a modern age in which most people prefer not to think too much about their demise. By contrast, the 18th-century writer and patron of the arts Hester Thrale Piozzi was frank, even playful, in imagining her own end. Two hundred years after her death, what can this writer - and her culture - teach us today about how to reconcile ourselves to mortality?

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Bicentenary conference celebrating Hester Thrale Piozzi co-sponsored by the University of York: http://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/thrale/

York's Dead Good Festival: https://www.yorksdeadgoodfestival.co.uk/