Front Row

Twelve flights. Twelve travellers. Twelve stories. David Szalay talks about his new book, Turbulence, which features lives in turmoil, each in some way touching the next. David Szalay was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 – and Turbulence is an original Radio 4 commission. The 55th annual Golden Horse awards, dubbed the "Chinese Oscars", saw An Elephant Sitting Still win best picture. C...

For his final role as an actor, Robert Redford plays a charming bank robber in The Old Man and the Gun, harking back to his early roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. Tim Robey reviews. Booker prize winning narrator of Anna Burns’s Milkman reads 19th century novels as she cannot bear the 20th century. What do other fictional characters read and what does it reveal about them,...

Strictly Come Dancing Head Judge Shirley Ballas describes her approach as fun, firm, feisty but fair. As one of the couples comes ever closer to raising this year’s glitter-ball trophy she talks about her own background in dance, dismisses the “curse” of Strictly and explains why she thinks the show has such appeal to young, old and everyone in between. Sarah Jenkins, who recently won the BBC Prom...

Hot on the heels of Disney's successful remake of The Jungle Book, Netflix release a live action/motion capture retelling of Kipling stories, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, directed by Andy Serkis and starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Benedict Cumberbatch. Novelist Katherine Rundell reviews. Samira talks to Dana Gioia, who as Poet Laureate of California recently went on a poetry reading o...

Naomi Alderman’s debut novel, Disobedience, has been adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. The women are reunited as Ronit, now living in New York, returns to her Orthodox Jewish community in London after her father’s death, reigniting a forbidden passion with her childhood friend Esti. Briony Hanson, Head of Film for the British Film Institute, reviews. Scottish artist Rac...

The 2018 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award today celebrated its 30th anniversary, and at the awards ceremony the prize was shared between two books for the first time. The two winning authors - Paul D Gibson for The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee, and Tom Gregory for A Boy in the Water - join the prize's co-founder Graham Sharpe and fellow judge Alyson Rudd to discuss the winning books and ref...

Fifty Shades of Grey and The Fall actor, Jamie Dornan, stars in new BBC Two drama Death and Nightingales. Based on Eugene McCabe's modern Irish classic novel of the same name, it’s a story of love across the religious and class divide, set in the beautiful countryside of Fermanagh in 1885. Theatre Royal Plymouth announced today they have commissioned the UK’s largest bronze sculpture, to be instal...

Golden Globe Award winner Ruth Wilson stars in the new BBC drama Mrs Wilson in a uniquely challenging role: she is playing her own grandmother, Alison Wilson. The drama follow Alison's investigation into the mysterious multiple lives of her husband Alec, which only come to light after his sudden death. TV critic Alison Graham gives her verdict. As veganism gains more popularity in the UK, we consi...

We reveal this year's Costa Book Awards shortlists. Critics Alex Clark and Toby Lichtig discuss the books chosen in the five categories: novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children's fiction. Category winners will appear on the programme in January and Front Row will announce the overall prize-winner on 29 January 2019. Documentary maker Sean McAllister reveals what has happened in the week...

Kurt Russell, whose credits include The Thing, Escape from New York and The Hateful Eight, discusses his new role as Santa Claus in the new Netflix family film The Christmas Chronicles. Russell looks back over his five-decade acting career, including the time he worked with Elvis and Walt Disney as a child actor. Poet Ruth Fainlight talks about her new collection Somewhere Else Entirely, her first...

Marianne Faithfull released her first record in 1965 and now aged 71 she's releasing her 21st. Titled Negative Capability, the album is inspired by loss, ageing, and love. She discusses being misunderstood, her refusal to live in the past, and why this album is her most honest. Last night Holly Willoughby made her I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! presenting debut in what is the first series...

Jane Fonda, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress, film producer, political activist and fitness guru, looks back at her 60 year career with Kirsty Lang. The feminist classic film 9 to 5, about three female office workers who take on their chauvinist boss, is being rereleased in cinemas. Jane Fonda, who produced and stars in the film, explains how she came up with the idea, cast Lily Tomlin a...

In Sebastian Barry’s inaugural speech as Laureate for Irish Fiction earlier this year, he stated that Ireland was in a 'golden age of prose'. As Northern Irish writer Anna Burns scooped the Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman last month, Front Row hears voices from the No Alibis bookstore in Belfast. We speak to former Irish Laureate and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright; Professor of Irish Hist...

Arts education has become the focus of a great deal of passion and concern recently, since the core, knowledge-based subjects took precedence over the creative subjects when the EBacc was introduced in England by the then Education Minister Michael Gove, announced in 2010. With the arts not being a requirement in the GCSE syllabus for the English Baccalaureate (the EBacc), leaders in the arts and...

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the second in the Fantastic Beasts film franchise from JK Rowling which explores the Wizarding World before Harry Potter. Eddie Redmayne and Johnny Depp star, and Jude Law joins the cast as a young Dumbledore. James Walters, Head of the Department of Film at the University of Birmingham reviews. As CAPSID, a new exhibition which explores how viruses b...

Getting butterflies is something many performers admit to, and although some thrive off it, others are often more badly affected. Professor of Performance Science, Aaron Williamon and West End psychologist Dr Anna Colton discuss the power of stage fright and how to overcome it. This week Channel 4 airs a true crime drama about Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who in 1999 shot dead a burglar at his...

Helena Bonham Carter discusses how she drew on her own experience of depression for her new film 55 Steps which is based on the life of Eleanor Riese. Riese was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 25 and successfully sued a hospital in San Francisco for the right to refuse anti-psychotic medication. At the time of her court case in 1989 Riese was 44, and had been in and out of psychiatric h...

To mark Armistice Day, Marin Alsop will be conducting Brahms's A German Requiem this weekend, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and in a break from tradition, she will be introducing the work from the podium. Marin discusses the reasons behind this move, and also reveals the various ways in which this requiem also broke from tradition. Russell Howard makes comedy out of political iss...

On Folkestone beach, film-maker Danny Boyle discusses Pages of the Sea, his Armistice Day tribute to the servicemen and women who left these shores in the First World War, many never to return. Members of the public will be invited to visit a number of beaches around the country to pay their respects, and will be given a specially-commissioned poem The Wound in Time, by Carol Ann Duffy. Zadie Smit...

Steve McQueen discusses his return to the big screen with Widows, an adaptation of the Lynda La Plante thriller. Set this time in Chicago, the widows must learn to survive after their husbands die in a botched heist leaving debts that need to be repaid in a city rife with professional crime and political corruption. Romeo and Juliet is more relevant to our young people than ever according to the R...

As Boy George releases his first new album with Culture Club in almost 20 years – simply called Life - he talks about being a changed man and contrasts making music today with the band’s heyday in the 80s. Academy award winning director Peter Jackson has added colour to archival footage from WWI for the first time in his new film They Shall Not Grow Old. But how is this colourisation achieved and...

Best-selling Irish novelist Cecelia Ahern discusses her new short story collection, Roar, which features 30 stories about 30 different women. India has unveiled the world's tallest statue, which cost £330 million to build. The 182m high structure in the western state of Gujarat is a bronze-clad tribute to independence leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Pratiksha Ghildial in the BBC’s Delhi bureau re...

Published in 2005, The Book Thief was an international bestseller that went on to become a successful Hollywood film. Now more than a decade later its author, Markus Zusak, is back with a new story, Bridge of Clay, about how five brothers deal with the disappearance of their father. American playwright Sarah DeLappe discusses her award-winning debut play, The Wolves, as it transfers to the UK. Pla...

Actor, comedian and opera fan Chris Addison discusses his role in La Traviata: Behind the Curtain, a new series of talks exploring the historical and social context of Verdi’s opera La Traviata for this year’s Glyndebourne Tour. He’s joined by musicologist Flora Willson, who explains why this 19th century work is the most-performed opera in the world. Dark Heart is the new ITV police procedural by...

A six part adaptation of John le Carré’s 1983 spy thriller The Little Drummer Girl has begun BBC One. Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgård discuss their roles playing young actress Charlie who is sucked into the shadowy world of espionage amid rising tensions in the Middle East, and Becker, the Israeli intelligence officer who recruits her. As the clocks go back we investigate the affect the dark...