This Cultural Life

John Wilson talks to fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi. Born in the south of France, she designed for various labels before teaming up with Stephen Marks in the early 1970s to establish French Connection as a worldwide clothing brand. She launched her own label Nicole Farhi in 1982 and was one of the biggest names in UK fashion for three decades. Nicole started studying sculpture whilst s...

Nick Cave, the Australian born singer-songwriter and author, reveals the formative influences and experiences that have inspired his own creativity. With his band The Bad Seeds, Cave is renowned for the darkness and drama of his narrative based work. His lyrics are often populated by flawed people doing bad things, but seeking redemption in love or God, or both. His musical output is diverse, rang...

An inseparable duo for over 55 years, Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore are the artistic couple known as Gilbert & George. Always formally dressed in matching suits, Gilbert & George have described themselves as ‘living sculptures’, and are usually the subject of their own work, which has involved sexual imagery, scatological humour and profane language. They’re best known for brightly c...

Now one of West Africa’s most internationally acclaimed musicians, Baaba Maal trained at a Paris conservatoire and went on to become a kind of musical ambassador, taking stories of his homeland all around the world. He has collaborated with Brian Eno and film composer Hans Zimmer, recorded an album with Mumford and Sons, and was a key member of the Africa Express touring project led by Damon Albar...

The internationally bestselling crime writer Donna Leon talks to John Wilson about her career. Although American born, Donna is most associated with Venice, the city in which her Italian police detective protagonist, the mild-mannered family man Guido Brunetti, lives and works. She has so far written 32 novels, has sold nearly eight million copies in English, and been translated into 35 languages....

Award-winning television dramatist and director Sally Wainwright talks to John Wilson about her formative cultural influences. After learning the art of screenwriting whilst working on Coronation Street, she made her name with her suburban comedy drama At Home With The Braithwaites. Her stories are usually set in the north of England including Last Tango in Halifax, and her 19th century historical...

Reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson reveals the influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Born in Jamaica, he moved to south London in 1963 at the age of eleven. He made his name as a performance poet, reciting politically motivated verse to a dub-reggae backbeat, and becoming a powerful voice of resistance and protest in response to racism on the streets of Britain in the 1970s. H...

John Wilson talks to photographer Martin Parr about the formative influences and experiences that inspired his own creativity. Globally renowned for his witty and satirical scenes of British life, Parr made his name in the 1970s with a series of monochrome photographs documenting the community of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. His fame grew with his 1985 project The Last Resort, which captured the...

Margaret Atwood talks to John Wilson about the formative influences and experiences that shaped her writing. One of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed authors, Atwood has published over 60 books including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She’s known for stories of human struggle against oppression and brutality, most famously her 1985 novel The Handm...

Mexican-born filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu talks to John Wilson about his cultural influences. Iñárritu's movies are often epic in scale and ambition. He made his name with the Mexican gangland drama Amores Perros, and won critical acclaim with his next two Hollywood movies; 21 Grams and Babel. His 2015 black comedy Birdman won him three of his five Academy Awards - for best film, best dir...

John Wilson speaks to internationally acclaimed artist Dame Rachel Whiteread about the influences on her practice as she recalls some of her most famous works. Part of the Brit Art boom of the early 1990s, Rachel was not only the first woman to win the Turner Prize but also, at 29, the youngest artist to do so. Rachel is best known for large scale sculptures cast in plaster or concrete. She made h...

Musician Eliza Carthy was born into an English folk dynasty. The daughter of acclaimed folk singers Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, she joined the family business at a young age as a singer and violinist, playing with her parents as Waterson Carthy and with her mother, her aunt Lal and her cousin Marry as The Waterdaughters. As a solo artist and bandleader, Eliza has explored the roots of folk a...

Oscar-winning film-maker Damien Chazelle talks to John Wilson about his career and cultural influences. As a child, Chazelle first started experimenting with making films using his dad’s old camcorder. After studying filmmaking at Harvard, he drew on his own experiences as a skilful jazz drummer to make his debut feature film Whiplash, about a music student and his abusive teacher. His movie La La...

The British born musician, composer and writer Stephen Hough grew up in Cheshire, won the piano section of the very first BBC Young Musician of the Year competition as a teenager, before moving to New York to study at the Juilliard School of Music. Over the last 30 years, Stephen Hough has made more than 60 albums and is globally renowned for his thrilling live performances of a wide classical pia...

Whoopi Goldberg is the one of very few people to have won all four of America’s big awards - Emmy, Grammy Oscar and Tony - for her work in film, theatre and television. Brought up by a single mother in a New York housing project, Whoopi Goldberg first made her name on stage with a solo comedy show before making her film debut in an adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Colo...

Theatre and film director Sam Mendes first made his mark when he launched London’s Donmar Warehouse theatre in the early 90s. He has won Olivier and Tony Awards for numerous productions including Cabaret, The Ferryman and most recently, The Lehman Trilogy. He made his cinematic debut directing American Beauty in 1999, and won the first of two Oscars - the second was for the war film 1917. He also...

Comedian, actor and composer Tim Minchin wrote the songs for the musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl story Matilda which, after more than a decade of sell-out West End shows, has now also been adapted for the big screen. His stage musical version of the film Groundhog Day earned him an Olivier award and seven Tony nominations on Broadway. He also co-wrote and starred in the television comedy dram...

Florence Pugh was Oscar and BAFTA nominated for her role as Amy March in the adaptation of Little Women. She has won huge acclaim for films including Midsommer, Lady Macbeth, and the Marvel adventure Black Widow. She also played the lead in the television adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. More recently she’s been on the big screen in Don’t Worry Darling, and 18th century Irish...

Shirin Neshat is the world’s foremost Iranian-born artist. Best known for her black and white portraits of veiled women, often with hands and faces overlain with intricate Farsi calligraphy, she works primarily as a photographer and filmmaker. A winner of one of the biggest international arts prizes, the Praemium Imperiale, she has shown art in galleries all round the world - except in Iran, as sh...

Over six decades, Ken Loach has forged a reputation as Britain’s foremost politically-engaged filmmaker, exploring issues of social justice, freedom and power. He has twice won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes The Barley, set amidst the Irish struggle for independence, and twenty years later for I, Daniel Blake, a contemporary British s...

Es Devlin is the world’s foremost set designer, having conceived stage sets for superstar musicians including Beyoncé, Stormzy, Kanye West, U2 and Adele. She has also created sets for opera houses around the world, and for productions at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and many more. Es also works as an artist in her own right, designing sculptural installation pieces that addr...

Actor and former MP Glenda Jackson reveals the influences and experiences that inspired her work on stage and screen. One of the greatest actors of her generation, Glenda won Academy Awards for Women in Love and A Touch Of Class, and was Oscar nominated for Sunday Bloody Sunday. She has also won Tony, Emmy and Golden Globes awards for her theatre and television work. In 1992 she gave up acting to...

Actor, writer and comedian James Corden reveals the most important people, events and cultural works that inspired his own creativity. He’s now probably best known as an Emmy-winning television chat show host, although he recently announced that he would step down from The Late Late Show in 2023. James Corden is the co-creator of the much-loved BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey, for which he won a BAFTA...

Author, poet and playwright Michael Morpurgo reveals the most important people, events and cultural works that inspired his own creativity. Michael is the former Children’s Laureate and author of some of the best loved stories for young people including Why The Whales Came, Private Peaceful and War Horse, which was adapted for the National Theatre stage and was filmed for cinema by Steven Spielber...

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah talks to John Wilson about the people, events, and cultural works that have inspired his creativity. Born in Zanzibar, the author and academic came to England as a political refugee at the age of 18, and now holds the post of Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. Since his first book Memory of Departure...