The Shift with Sam Baker

This week we're revisiting the legendary Jamaican journalist Barbara Blake Hannah. I spoke to Barbara at the start of last year and she blew me away. What. A. Woman. My guest today is the Jamaican author, journalist, film maker and (no exaggeration) living legend Barbara Blake Hannah. Already an experienced journalist when she arrived in London in 1964, Barbara was shocked to discover her achievem...

While we take our summer hiatus we're revisiting some classic episodes of The Shift with Sam Baker. Since I recorded this interview with Tracey back at the start of 2021, she and her partner Ben Watt have released a new Everything But The Girl album, Fuse, that's rocketed them back into the charts. Like many 80s kids, I grew up with today’s guest. Tracey Thorn started early, forming The Marine Gir...

To celebrate the DJ's 27th year of presenting Glastonbury on the BBC, we revisit one of the very first episodes of The Shift podcast, back in 2020, with Jo Whiley Career crises are tough at the best of times, but imagine being in the midst of menopause – hot flushes, anxiety, brain fog, the lot – and finding your thirty year career is crashing down around your ears. That’s what happened to this we...

For this bonus episode of The Shift, I’m delighted to welcome a very special guest: the award-winning author of ten bestselling novels, Barbara Kingsolver.  Every so often, a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you meet. For me, Demon Copperhead, is one of those books. A reimagining of the Dickens classic, David Copperfield, translated to the Appalachian mountains in...

If 18-year-old Sam was here now, today’s episode would be a real pinch-me moment. Back in the mid-80s, I was a student in Birmingham when I first stumbled upon the dark green spine that was the hallmark of a newish publisher called Virago. It started with one book in particular – The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Reading that book changed my life, as I don’t doubt many Virago books have done fo...

My guest today is the award-winning broadcaster Aasmah Mir. Born and brought up in Glasgow, of Pakistani Heritage, Aasmah started in newspapers before moving to the BBC, where she worked for twenty years - most famously as co-host of Saturday Live. She joined Times Radio three years ago, as cohost of the Breakfast Show and is a two-time winner of a Sony Gold Award, kind of like a radio Oscar. She’...

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a woman who was alive in the 90s who didn’t own one of this designer's dresses (or at least one heavily inspired by her from the high street). From the moment they hit the shops, the bias cut slip dress became ubiquitous and it still is. And for that we have to thank Tanya Sarne, the founder of Ghost. Personally I still have five of her dresses and I’m neither a dress g...

Today’s guest is the comedian Josie Long. Josie started early – and I mean EARLY. She has been performing standup since she was 14, and by 17 won the BBC New comedy award. She was the first woman to be nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award three times and is co-founder of the education charity, Arts Emergency. Josie is also a regular on those terrifying panel shows where you just know you’d thi...

My guest for Mental Health Awareness Week 2023 is mental health campaigner, psychiatrist and bestselling novelist Joanna Cannon. Jo left school at 15 only returning to complete her A levels when she decided to train as a doctor in her late 30s. She specialised in psychiatry before leaving medicine to write in her mid-40s. (How many life shifts can one woman handle!?) But Jo’s passion for psychiatr...

OK, I admit it, I’m a bit in awe, because today’s guest is someone I’ve wanted to get on The Shift for the longest time. You might know Ruby Wax as a successful comedian and presenter, one of the funniest women of her generation. Or you might know her as a mental health campaigner and best-selling author. One thing’s for sure, she has been using humour to make the rest of us feel better for decade...

How does it feel to walk into a room and know that everyone already thinks they know all there is to know about you. That’s the position today’s guest, Melanie Sykes has found herself in repeatedly over the last thirty years. After starting out modelling and then moving into TV and radio presenting, Melanie decided she’d well and truly had enough in her 40s, and stepped back from broadcasting to r...

This week's guest is the rural poverty campaigner Natasha Carthew. Natasha was born and brought up in Cornwall, in the 19th century fishing and farming village of Downderry where the Carthews had been resident from the very start. Natasha has spent her life noisily campaigning to give working class writers a voice. Where some might tire of banging their heads against the closed door of the affluen...

I first encountered today’s guest, Marina Benjamin, when I was researching The Shift book and stumbled across her memoir, The Middlepause. An insightful look at what middle age means today, it was prompted by Marina’s own sudden menopause after a hysterectomy. The sense of dislocation she described was the first time I’d ever seen the way I felt put down in black and white. She followed it up with...

My guest today is the bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld. I first came across Curtis when both our debut novels were named “ones to watch” by Time Magazine. They turned out to be right about one of us. It wasn’t me! Since that first novel, Prep, hit the big time, Curtis has written six more novels and two short story collections. The most famous of which is the transat...

Today’s guest is the anti-guru behind the massive No F*cks Given franchise, Sarah Knight. What started life with the Marie Kondo pastiche, The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving A F*ck, now comprises 7 guides and three journals which have sold three million copies and a TED talk that’s notched up ten million views.  But Sarah wasn’t always the queen of giving zero f*cks. Scroll back to her mid-30s...

Today’s guest, Anita Bhagwandas, is that rare thing, a beauty journalist who’s prepared to call out the beauty industry. Anita B, as she's known, is currently a beauty columnist on the Guardian. But throughout her career she has worked on some of the biggest names in women’s magazines and consulted for some of the most famous brands. It’s not exactly the CV of someone you’d expect to see campaigni...

Today’s guest is one of the most stylish women I know, but I also know that she won’t mind me saying, it wasn’t always that way. Now Fashion Director of The Times, I first met Anna Murphy when we were both regular stalwarts of the second row at the biannual ready to wear fashion shows. She was then editor of the Telegraph magazine Stella and I was editor of Red, both magazines deemed not quite fas...

My guest today is the bestselling writer Dani Shapiro. Dani is best known for the memoirs that made her name. Startlingly honest works of self-investigation like Slow Motion, in which she examines the questionable decisions her younger self made (let’s face it, whose younger self didn’t?). And the book that catapulted her to the top of the bestseller lists, Inheritance.  In Inheritance, Dani explo...

We’ve all had those moments in our lives when everything feels… darker, colder, a little (or a lot) less hopeful. Those emotional winters were perfectly encapsulated by today’s guest, Katherine May in her transatlantic bestseller, Wintering, the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Her new book is another soothing antidote for the way we live now, Enchantment, Reawakening wonder in an exh...

I first met todays guest, Canadian singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, when I interviewed her in Glasgow a few weeks ago. 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 released seven critically acclaimed albums. The latest of which, Love Will Be R...

This episode is a first for me: it’s the first time I’ve interviewed someone without knowing who they are. Because today’s guest, Carolyn Hays, is a bestselling novelist who has chosen to publish her new book under a pseudonym to protect her family’s privacy. That book is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve read in a long time. A Girlhood is a moving, compassionate, thought-provoking letter to C...

I’ve been trying to get today’s guest into The Shift hot seat for the longest time - after a mixture of long covid (me) and impromptu trips to the jungle (Her!), we’ve finally made it.  Charlene White has been a journalist for over 20 years. She was the first black woman to present the ITV News At Ten (in 2014… I know, right?), and is that rare thing a news journalist who actually sounds like a hu...

I’m delighted to welcome back my good friend Jojo Moyes. Jojo was one of the very first people I interviewed for the pod back when it was just a random idea. Like all good friends do, she had my back! For that and many other things, I owe her. As I’m pretty sure you already know, Jojo is the global bestselling novelist of Me Before You, and 16 other novels. I think! She’s sold 51million copies glo...

Hello and welcome back to The Shift. Somehow we're onto our 11th season and I'm thrilled to start 2023 with podcasting legend, the creator of Griefcast herself, Cariad Lloyd. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to join what she calls The Grief Club, chances are you’ve already encountered Cariad, through her conversation-changing, taboo-busting, award-winning podcast Griefcast. A much-needed place to...

Over the Christmas period and into the new year, I'm going to be replaying some of my quiet-favourite episodes of 2022. This week is the utterly fearless Clover Stroud. This episode first aired last March. ---- It takes courage to lay yourself bare on the page the way today’s guest does. Journalist Clover Stroud has written three memoirs - The Wild Other, My Wild and Sleepless Nights and, now, The...