The Shift with Sam Baker

My guest today is the acclaimed writer Siri Hustvedt. The author of seven novels (including my personal favourite What I Loved and the Booker longlisted The Blazing World), five essay collections, a poetry collection and a memoir, The Shaking Woman, or a history of my nerves. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is also a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical...

There aren’t many people I let make a repeat visit to The Shift, but sometimes a guest proves so popular that I have to make an exception. That’s the case with journalist and author Bryony Gordon. The first time Bryony came on The Shift we talked mental health, alcoholism and the gratitude she felt in reaching 40 . A couple of years later it was all about perimenopause. Today, Bryony is back and w...

My guest today is the pioneering publisher, Margaret Busby. It is safe to say that without Margaret’s lifelong work the publishing industry today- and indeed our bookshelves - might look very different.  In 1965, at just 22, she became Britain’s youngest first black female publisher, when she formed Allison and busby with Clive Allison, who she met at a party at university. Margaret was editorial...

This episode first aired in May 2022. Today’s guest is a woman I’ve admired for the longest time: stage and screenwriter Abi Morgan. Throughout her thirty year career Abi has written some of our most memorable drama: Shame, Sex Traffic, The Queen, Iron Lady, The Hour (for which she won an Emmy), Suffragette and, most recently, the BBCone hit, The Split. In her work, female characters took centre s...

This episode of The Shift first aired in June 2024. I first came across today’s guest, Dr Emily Nagoski, on this very podcast, when my then guest Sarah Knight (creator of the NoFucks Given franchise) raved about the transformational power of her runaway bestseller, Come As You Are. I hunted it down and, like millions of women the world over, I was blown away. A sex expert speaking our language? Ta...

This episode of The Shift first aired in August 2021. My guest today is one of the most intelligent, thoughtful people I’ve ever interviewed - and I’ve interviewed A LOT. Writer and academic, Elif Shafak has written 19 books and 12 novels and been shortlisted for countless literary prizes, including the Booker Prize. Known for her bravery and outspokenness in the face of oppressive regimes, she ha...

This episode of The Shift first aired in June 2022. I’ve lost count of the number of women I’ve spoken to who were taken totally by surprise by perimenopause but, to date, none of them actually had medical training. Todays guest changes all that. Before she was an award winning writer, Christie watson was a nurse. She spent 20 years on children’s intensive care before her debut won the Costa first...

This episode of The Shift revisited was first aired in February 2023. I first met today's guest, Canadian singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, when I interviewed her in Glasgow at the end of 2022. We got talking about the nuts and bolts of midlife in the green room and I was thrilled when she agreed to continue the conversation on The Shift. One of our foremost singer songwriters, Martha has relea...

Somehow it’s the end of our 20th season and I’m delighted to say that my guest today is a woman who has spent the last decade giving us a masterclass in ageing. One of my very own old bird role models, Prue Leith. Now 86, Prue has lived a multitude of lives. Chef, businesswoman, author, food columnist, board director, DBE, campaigner for Dignity in Dying and television host, most recently, of cour...

This week I’m delighted to welcome back the powerhouse Poorna Bell. Poorna is a journalist, author and speaker known for her advocacy on body image and diversity. And now she’s adding ageing to the list of things she is not about to shut up about. When Poorna first came on The Shift she had not long turned 40 and it’s fair to say she was a little trepidatious about the ageing process. Hardly surpr...

My guest today doesn’t really need an introduction. Elizabeth Gilbert is many things - an internationally bestselling author of the global phenomenon, Eat Pray Love, a Time 100 most influential person, a speaker and a teacher, with millions of online followers. But she is also, to put it in her own words, a ‘human permission slip’, the woman who told an entire generation of women it was OK to do w...

My guest today, Fatima Bhutto, knows more than most about loss and living with a traumatic family legacy. Now 43, Fatima is descended from one of Pakistan’s most prominent political dynasties. When she was just 14, her father, the politician Murtaza Bhutto, was killed by his political opponents during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Her grandfather, the former President and Prime Mi...

This is a special live episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, recorded live at the wonderful Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh.  Catherine Newman is the author of some of the most on-the-nose books about being a woman in midlife that I’ve ever read - her bestselling debut, We All Want Impossible Things, Sandwich and, now, Wreck. Imagine if Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton met in...

Say the word wellness and it conjures an instant image in our minds… glowing skin, enviable abs, sludgy looking juice, tasteful muted leisurewear and lots and lots of money. Where we used to have diets and anti-ageing cream, we now have peloton and ashwaghanda gummies and collagen powder. Or we do if we can afford to. So I’m delighted to welcome to The Shift, the award-winning American journalist...

Hello and welcome to The Shift - the podcast that aims to tell the no-holds barred truth about being a woman post-40. Created and hosted by me, journalist and author, Sam Baker. Have I got a treat for you today. Because my guest this week is Gretchen Rubin, one of the most influential writers on habits, happiness and human nature.  Gretchen is the author of the NYT bestsellers The Happiness Projec...

Hello and welcome to SEASON 20! of The Shift - the podcast that aims to tell the no-holds barred truth about being a woman post-40. Created and hosted by me, writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker. At any one time, approximately 13 million women in the UK are ‘in menopause’, in the US that number rises to a humungous 75million. And yet, as you will be well aware, until just a few years ago, if you said...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Last but very much not least is my oldest ever guest Dr Gladys McGarey. Dr Gladys was 102 when we recorded this episode. She has sadly since died, in September 2024, two months before her 104th birthday... ---- A few months ago...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Next up, bestselling novelist Isabel Allende... ---- The main word I can think of to describe this week’s guest is wise. (Well there are other words - fabulous and no-bull for starters - but wise is the biggie.) Bestselling aut...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Next up, screenwriting legend Lynda La Plante... ---- My guest this week is a woman who - to coin a bit of 1980s jargon - punched through the glass ceiling for women in TV, creating not just one but a series of female lead char...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Next up is Australian literary legend Helen Garner who, in her 83rd year has finally broken out in the UK and US and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for her collected diaries, How To End A Story... --- My guest today is the writer...

• To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. First up Miriam Margolyes... ---- It’s the final episode of the season and all my podcasting dreams have come true. Because my guest this week - by popular demand and a whole ton of begging - is the one, the only, the legend...

My guest on the final episode of this season is Anne, Lady Glenconner.  Now 93, Lady Glenconner has lived to put it bluntly, one hell of a life. She was born in 1932, the eldest daughter of the 5th earl of Leicester and brought up in the early 20th century’s rigid social hierarchy on the ancestral estate of Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Which, incidentally, she didn’t inherit because primogeniture, of...

My guest today is the accidental radical Karen Dobres. Until her early fifties, Karen’s life had taken a path familiar to so many women. From modelling in her early twenties, she trained as a counsellor and worked alongside bringing up a family. So far, so familiar. Then, as she puts it, she had her final period, attended her first football match and everything changed. Growing up in the 70s, when...

My guest today is a woman on a mission to preserve the language of her grandparents. Playwright, screenwriter and novelist Samantha Ellis is the author of one of my personal favourites How To Be A Heroine. Sam was in her early 40s and a new mum when it dawned on her that her mother tongue - or milk language - was on the verge of dying out. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Sam grew up surroun...

For many of us losing our memory is our worst nightmare. To be told that that is happening when you are still young (ish) is close to unimaginable. That’s what happened to this week’s guest, writer, teacher and reader in residence at Charleston, Holly Dawson. Holly was just 40 when she started to lose her grasp of where she was. She was ultimately diagnosed with epilepsy. A scan of her brain revea...