Author Daniyal Mueenuddin

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to the Arts Out from the BBC World Service. I'm Nikki Bady bringing you a star-studded and global lineup of guests and some cultural companionship with the best arts and culture conversation from across the BBC and beyond. Coming up, the always bold and imaginative American filmmaker Richard Link later talks about his latest film, New Velvag, which pays homage to French New Wave cinema. Or should that be homage? Albanian writer and academic Leah EP celebrates the music of her mother country and the Maverick British musician, Jacob Collier, tries to get school pupils singing. Also on the show, Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, delves into the sounds of his multiple Oscar nominated film It Was Just An Accident. We hear from Chinese Canadian novelist Shantal, that's not all though. Later in the show, we'll be joined by Daniel Muonuddin, the Pakistani American author of one of this year's hottest-tipped novels. This is where the serpent lives. And joining us as this week's cultural critic, we welcome back Videsha. Videsha, do you have a cultural recommendation for the world this week? Yes, because the Japanese filmmaking author, Takashi Miike, has come up with his latest film. He's very prolific and this one's called Sham. It's based on a very provocative and controversial school bullying case that happened in Japan. But really, you can watch any of his movies. They are all fantastic. Audition, right? Audition is the famous one. It's a sort of horror comedy. Or if you like a bit of swords and swishing silks, you can watch Blade of the Immortal. But really, he's such a great filmmaker. Anything of his is worth watching. Thank you for that. We begin today's arts-er with a truly great American filmmaker, Richard Linklater. From his early works, Dazed and Confused and Slacker to the Before Trilogy and his brilliant animated film Waking Life, his films are groundbreaking. Boyhood, for example, was a radical commitment. He filmed it across 12 years. His latest film, Newville Vag, Shot in Black and White, re-imagines Jean-Luc Godard, the on-forn to re-blow French cinema, making his film breathless. Godard ignited the French new wave in the late 1950s, tearing up filmmaking rules with jump cuts, handheld cameras, no scripts. When Richard Linklater spoke to the BBC Samira Ahmed, he set the historical scene for Newville Vag. It was happening all over the world. It was happening, certainly, in England, the US everywhere. But the French kind of, they sort of invented the cinephile. They held these magazines. A lot of the movie centers around the Cuyahue de Cinema, the famous magazine they all wrote for. And they just had so many kind of great filmmakers who go down in history. There was such a concentration of talent. So I think Paris sort of wins the prize in the Newville Vag. But it was really, it was a worldwide phenomenon that was happening. But yeah, a super-at-time that still, even though it's half of cinema history ago, 65 or so years. It's still very influential, because I think it pointed away to a new kind of movie. That was personal, not so much genre. A movie could be anything. So I think its influence is so big now that it's taken for granted. But it's kind of the prototype of the more indie-spirited films. Your passion really comes across. And of course, there's a master of indie-spirited films, Richard. This film, Newville Vag, feels like a loving homage to these filmmakers. I was astounded that there's a caption that comes up at the end. There's 162 filmmakers made their debut feature in just three years in France. At this time. How important have these films been to you? Have they shaped you? Oh, very much. And I'm still discovering there were so many films. And like every art period, some go down in history, some are more famous than others. But there's so much quality work. I was fun being in Paris and kind of seeing some of these films that I didn't know so well. We all know the Truffaut, Goudard, the top names, Trabreau and all the usual suspects. But there's another layer and there's other parts of town. Like I said, we were kind of around the Cahill du Cinema. But other parts of town, the left bank, a little more political. You know, there's just Varda and Demi and very, very influential. Just love the spirit of the movies. And they really encourage you. They kind of say, go do it. You know, like again, it seems accessible. Like, hey, just they shot the film. To see the movie, it's so humble to watch this classic movie being made because it looks almost like a student film. Well, it took a bit about that, how you do it, because for people who have not seen the film and may not realize how breathless it was made, you know, they are shooting on the hoof on the street. They don't often have dialogue. Sometimes they're hiding a camera in a trolley and covering it up with the blanket. How much of this were you finding out for the first time? Or is it well documented? It's extremely well documented. There was a lot of, oh, just pictures, everything. So we were working off a template of facts, you know, in history, not only the film itself and other films, but just a ton of photos. You see the images being made in the movie. I give a lot of space to Ramon Kushdie, who took all these iconic photos, not just of Abu D'Asooth, but the other films and kind of, you can see the legends being born, kind of posed. You know, these guys had a real knack for promotion. G'dard's kind of a self-methologizer. You can see that kind of happening in front of our eyes. And it creates a lot of difficulty, I guess, for those around him. But, you know, I was really trying to make an artifact of the time that also obviously expressed the making of this one film, but kind of the spirit of the time. And, yeah, it was fun to go back to Beginner's mind and make what I felt like, yeah, I was in my late 20s again, making my first film. That's how this film felt. Tell me a bit about that, because I was thinking about what I was watching in Vellag, the sense of them making up as they go along filming on the street, these young unknowns. Thinking back to your first films, like, you know, Slacker and Days and Confused. Did you see the parallel? Oh, yeah, you work off your own past. And I could relate, you know, making a film where you have to communicate your ideas to others, especially if you don't have a conventional script and you're trying to do something different. It's hard to describe. You have to kind of weave a spell over everybody you're working with. And you have to be a little bit of a, a little local cult leader on this one project, you know, that's kind of incumbent on a director to create some belief around yourself. Well, one of the interesting things about creating belief is you're shooting on the streets of Paris today. And yet you somehow managed to do something to make it look like 1959. Is that magic of modern technology? This film, the film I made, was made in a style 180 degrees different from the way they made their film. They could show up without permits and just shoot and hide a camera. Obviously that Paris is long gone. So we have to create everything. I mean, Paris is pretty well preserved. But the first floor, the street level is commercial and very different. So the film, "Nouveau-Vogue" is, it's a bit of a visual trick on so many levels. But I don't want it to feel that way. I want it to feel like it was shot spontaneously. So it's a bit of a tonal and visual trick. We're trying to pull off. But that was the fun of it. Richard Lincolay to discussing his film, "Nouveau-Vogue". This week's "Our Cultural Critique" is "Vedisha". Are you a Richard Lincolay fan? I am. Because I grew up watching his films and I like his loose, easy-going exploration of what it is to be an American. His films are very American. They're about, if you're this kid and you're growing up in the middle of nowhere in your ambitious and artsy, how do you break through? How do you grow up? What does it mean to be particularly an American young guy in this gigantic country, which is really very young? So he's actually got the same freshness as the "Nouveau-Vogue" directors that he's inspired by. So Jean-Lou Goddard's film, "Bratless" or "A Budesuit" is iconic. It evokes a certain black and white image of Paris in the '60s. It has a cool jazz soundtrack. Why? For people who haven't seen it, for example. Why is it so iconic? You have to see it in context. This is filmmaking coming out of the doldrums of the two world wars. Everything we take for granted in cinema now actually came about relatively recently. In the 1950s, the '60s, that nice, relaxed, non-stagey atmosphere, the idea of shooting on the fly. It's very difficult to shoot on the fly in the 1950s because cameras were gigantic and noisy. And where do you change? Where do you do the costuming? Where do you rehearse? It's so radical and it must have completely shocked audiences who were used to watching much more formal, much more serious filmmaking. At the end of the day, this generation of filmmakers weren't interested in talking about the trauma of war. They were talking about freedom and love and sexuality and not having to go through things as their parents and their grandparents did. And that must have been very confronting and very controversial. And why do you think that that new wave movement in cinema remains so influential in filmmakers today because surely they would have developed their own ways of doing things and moved forward? I think the French are exceptionally good at fostering and protecting their art forms. There has always been funding and cultural space for directors to develop an entire career, not just to have one hit. But to keep on creating over decades and French culture takes cinema seriously, it took other countries a little while to catch on and in many markets as they say. Cinema didn't get taken seriously until it started making tons and tons of money. The French didn't see it that way. They saw it as an extension of song or art or novels. Thank you, Bodisha. You're listening to The Arts Out from the BBC World Service, I'm Nikki Bady. Leah EP is a writer and academic who grew up in communist Albania. Her latest book, In Dignity, is inspired by her grandmother and explores the cultural inheritance and history of the southeastern region of Europe where she grew up. When Leah EP was asked by the BBC's Michael Barkley to choose some music that was meaningful to her and her life, she picked the words of the candle by composer Limos Dizdari. It's one of Albania's most important pieces of music named after a poem by Naim Frasheri, a key figure in the so-called Albania National Awakening in the 19th century. She explained why it's so significant we begin with a little taste. What I really love about this piece is how it's both forward-looking and backward-looking. I mean, all national Awakening movements have a nostalgic element and then there's also this yearning for freedom that occasionally comes through these nostalgic notes. I was going to say that yearning quality and sort of folk music seem to be married together and there, didn't they? Absolutely, and it was really important to Albanian communism that you had this mixing of both European elements, enlightenment and progressive movements around the world, but also something very distinctive about the country and its own identity. And so in some ways it was also very nationalist. Tell us a little bit, Leah, you hear about growing up in Albania. What were your parents like? My mother was a school teacher. She was a math teacher. She had actually never wanted to be a math teacher. She wanted to study literature, but because she came from a family of bourgeoisie, old bourgeoisie that had been expropriated, during communism, she had been forced more or less to study something she didn't really want to study, and so she taught maths already a hard subject, but she taught it even more harshly. And I think this also reflected in her parenting style. She was quite strict. And my father was a forest engineer. They both worked full-time. I grew up with my grandmother. She was at home with us. My father was the exact opposite of my mother. He was much softer and more tolerant. And did your grandmother give you an insight into the Albania of the past? I knew that my grandmother was not born in Albania. She spoke French to me. I didn't know why she spoke French. Every time I asked her whether we had relatives or people that were connected in some ways to France, she would say, but you like the French revolution, don't you? Or you like watching the miserably in the puppet theatre or Enver Hogeau, or communist leader, studied in France, so what's wrong with the speaking French? There was something about her upbringing that was a little bit of a mystery to me. And I knew she was born in Salonica in Greece, and sometimes she would sing to me. My first lullaby was actually a song that she sang in Greek. And I think this next piece reminds you of her. This is the song. It was incredible to discover it many years later. I had this tune in my mind, and then at some point when I was researching her life and trying to think about writing a book on her life, I went and remembered the first line, this tocanardini Mugliko, and went and googled it and discovered that there was indeed a song and that it was performed by the same singer that she remembered when she sang this song, Rosas Canazi. It's called the Canary. Does it ape the sounds of a Canary? I think it has something of that and of the warmth of this proximity to the Canary, it gives them to me when I listen to that song. It also echoes this warmth that being with my grandmother, it's a love song, but for me, what sang is a lullaby, and I remember being actually carried, that must have been really, really young, but I remember being carried and listening to this. We did hear the Canary. It's amazing, and it has a set of comforting quality, you know the chirping of birds. Rosas Canazi was a Jewish Sephardic by background, and she was born in Constantinople, but then moved to Salonica and would have been singing my grandmother as I said grew up in Salonica just after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. She was born in 1918. One of the most important memories in her childhood was the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And this song, I think evokes this entire world of Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Albanian, Armenian, Salonica, it wasn't extremely cosmopolitan city. It remained that for a few years, even after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, where you would hear a lot of different languages, the biggest cultural groups were Jews, actually, not Greeks. Well, you now speak six languages, and in some ways thanks to her French, for example. So, was learning studying at school something that came fairly naturally to you, were you excited? I think there was no other choice really, both because of a communist ethos of the schools, and the education system was one where we competed on knowledge, you know, this was not a rich society where you'd splash your wealth around, and so you wouldn't show off with your bags, but you'd show off with how many books you'd read, and how many interesting films you had watched, and how many interesting things you could say in conversation. So there was a very competitive dynamic in the school system to just acquire more and more knowledge, and also of course in my family this had also been always very important, and in a way it was never an option not to read, not to learn, not to do well, not to be committed. Lea Epe and I look forward to reading in dignity. Before the arts I went on tour to Tirana, that's Albania's capital city. I read her book, "Free, coming of age at the end of history," and it was the perfect primer to understand Albania through her eyes, so it was before and after communism. Our Arts, our cultural critic this week is Videsha. She was very interesting on Albanian music, Videsha. What did you take away from what she said? I found myself listening to her and feeling incredibly nostalgic for an era, not of communism, but of multilingual, multicultural, artistic, cultured, sophisticated society, where it's completely normal to speak multiple languages, and it made me think that just because time is passing things don't necessarily get better, we've actually moved backwards socially in that sense. So people learn fewer languages. There's more resistance to learning languages. I think there's more of a line between different art forms. You know, Lea is a commentator and a writer, but she's inspired by music and by poetry. I absolutely love that because as an artist there's no difference for me between different art forms and there's no difference between different languages. So I get very cross when people say, "Oh, I'm very bad at languages," or "Oh, I like poetry, but I don't like music," or "I like film, but I don't like dance," and it's all to do with expression and community and communication to me. It was really refreshing too to hear, Lea, talk about the huge cultural influence her grandmother clearly had on her. What have you taken from your grandparents? My grandparents were an incredibly mild-mannered civil servant who was a little bit of a hyper-condriarch and a very, very tough matriarch figure who I hope I have inherited a lot from. I mean, she definitely gave it to her daughter, who's my mum. So I'm praying that some of that inner resilience and steel has come across. I think it has. Thank you, Bidisha. You're with the art sour and I'm Nikki Bady. Some more musical memories now. Musician Jacob Collier has been one of Britain's hottest exports in recent years. He's currently heading a campaign to get school pupils impassioned about singing and told the BBC's pet troc Trilloni why it's important to him. I was the child at school whose life was transformed by singing and everyone starts on the ground level, you know, singing in school assembly is a social experiment. It's a beautiful feeling. It's funny, it's entertaining, it's expansive. I was so lit up by it as a child. I carried those lessons that were built into the idea of singing and togetherness and joy. Well, through the whole of my child and into my adult life and have become a musician. But I think the crucial thing to say is that the lessons you learn as part of choir don't need to be applied to music. They can be applied to life as well. I was very struck by something you said earlier on today. You don't need skill to sing, you need permission. Permission is more important than skill. Absolutely. I think there's a strange barrier to entry that I perceive in music education around this idea that, you know, you need to be good to start with. Why? You know, you need to start with to start with. And so just opening the door and saying, look, this is an opportunity to play. The goal is not to be an expert, the goal is to be a part of the thing, to be included. It's for everybody and at its best it's for everybody. It's not at its best when it's for the elite only, you know, it's at its best when it's all inclusive and just takes life at face value and says, look, let's let's muck in and join forces here. It also makes the point that above anything else, this is fun. Oh, it's so much fun. And it's not serious, but it's important. And I think there's a difference between something being serious and something being important. I think something being serious is about being uptight, you know, it's all a bit conservative, you know, type of top button and all that stuff. But something that's important, it's just something crucial that was already here. Music was already here, it's an ancient thing. We're all made of it. You know, we're made of little wiggling, vibrating particles and it was the first human language. And so I think that it, to me, is about returning to something much older than some of these far newer, far more divisive sort of institutions. And saying, hey, you realize this is within you. This is within you all along. Maybe this is an excuse for you to embrace some of these things that have existed, you know, under the surface and bring those things out into the world. Jacob Collier, thank you very much. Thank you very much. I've been holding something. Jacob Collier, I loved what he said about not needing skill to sing, but needing permission. Videsha, you're nodding there. Do you share his passion and belief in the importance of singing? I was so relieved to hear his advice because I'm one of those who sang karaoke once terribly in 2002 or 2003. Gok slow-clapped off the stage. No! And then never sang again in public. Who were you with? I was obviously at a hipster bar in New York and I tried to sing Madonna, Papa, Don't Preach, which I realised now is incredibly high-pitched and the deep-press. I couldn't hit any of the notes, not even one note. Well, I once did karaoke at an arts hour Christmas evening and decided to do a very famous grime artist's track, "Pass Out." I cannot tell you how silly I feel even saying that out loud. Thank heavens you weren't there. Do you get, though, Videsha? Do you sing in the shower or wherever people traditionally hum along to things? Yes, totally. I think it's a completely fundamental physical activity. It's something to do with vibrations in your blood, in your lungs, in your heart, in your muscles. We never sing when we're unhappy. We're always sing when we're lovely and relaxed and we're joyful. So there must be something to it which is about positivity. And I love what Jacob said about giving yourself permission. It doesn't need to sound good. You just need to relax and let it come naturally. And I do sing in the shower and I can sing, I think. What did you sing this morning? I didn't sing this morning. Oh, sorry. I guess I'm not having it. You saved your energy for us. That's why. Videsha, thank you. You're with the BBC World Service. This is the Artseller and I'm Nikki Bady. The Iranian director, Jeff Farnahi, won the coveted Palm Door at last year's Cannes Film Festival for his latest film, It Was Just An Accident. The film now has two Oscar nominations for best international film and best screenplay. It was just an accident, focuses on a group of the Iranian former prisoners led by Vaheib, who've all been interrogated by the same man. None of them saw his face, but they all remembered his sound, the way he walked with a prosthetic leg. When they're all shown the man Vaheib thinks tortured them, they put him in the back of a van, setting off a tense and morally charged journey. But none of them is certain that he is their torturer. It was just an accident, is a timely exploration of justice and trauma in modern Iran, a country where the director, Jeff Farnahi, has been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned. He recently spoke to Jason DeRosso through a translator on ABC Radio National Screen Show and talked about how sound was used in the film to evoke fear. Here's a clip from the film first. Look, when you are being interrogated, because you cannot see the person, that sound is very important to you. And when you're being released from jail, then that sound and that voice or noise is with you. Constantly you are looking for that sound. And this man, the movie, as soon as he heard the sound, it's as if he had been waiting for many years to hear it again. And this sound calls him to go from certainty to go to uncertainty and from uncertainty to go to the certainty. And this is the game that until the last minute of the film is taking us with it to find out what is it. And then in the last shot of the movie, you hear the sound again. The audience is grasping their breath or just they cannot breathe anymore. They can hear the sound again. Jeff Abanahi talking about his film, it was just an accident. Our cultural critic this week is Bodisha, Bodisha, what are your thoughts on the film? Completely fantastic and no more or less than what I expect from such a brilliant director. You mentioned the pain and the trauma and the idea of memory and state repression, but his films are also shot through with absurdist humour. Yes. All the time, lots of things happen which seem accidental or contingent. And what's often so funny is that groups of people who ought to be enemies instead end up forming a weird little family unit. So they are political opponents and yet they will have to rub along together in the in the back of this fan. And so much of the warmth and humour of this is political too because it says that even though we are formally divided at a human level in a weird way, we can all get along. And I'm sure that's born out of his own experiences. He is simultaneously worshipped and prized as an artist, but he himself is continually harassed by the authorities. Some of whom I would bet are fans of his films. Jaffa Penahi is one of Iran's best known directors. There are many, but where should someone listening to ask chatting here who hasn't seen any of his other films begin in your opinion, Vidisha? Start with the film that's called This Is Not A Film. Jaffa Penahi is an absolute genius at turning trouble and strife into creativity. So he often as an actor himself plays directors who have been banned from making films or being out in public life. And This Is Not A Film is a very meta riff on that. And as is typical for him, it is sinister and claustrophobic and hilarious and absurd all at the same time. Thank you, Vidisha. You're listening to The Artself and the BBC World Service. The New York Times recently asked in a headline, "What if Chekhov had lived in Pakistan?" They were referring to the Pakistani American writer, Daniel Mu'Nuddin, and his novel This Is Where The Serpent Lives. Daniel joins us now from Oslo. So first of all, I have to ask you, Daniel, how did you feel about that comparison? Well, obviously, I don't object to being compared to Chekhov. The review in which that appears has a little bit of a sting at the end. No, but you brought that up. I wasn't going to do that. I just robbed and repurposed the best line of it. Well, you see, as the writer, I of course find the most negative part of the review, not the novel. Well, you really mustn't because I absolutely adored this novel. And let me describe the book and the story before I ask you any more questions. Is a sweeping novel set in Pakistan that chronicles the intertwined lives of a really diverse cast of beautifully drawn characters across the decades. And at the heart of the story is Yazid, an orphaned boy who rises from the margins of society to become a trusted servant in elite circles. So then, yeah, let's talk about the early story of Yazid because he's taken in by a man who has a tea and a curry business on the streets of Raoul Pindi. How easy is it to jump class in Pakistan like that? That's the theme of my book, essentially, the difficulty of moving between classes. And Yazid is one test case. And then, as a sort of pendant at the end of the book, I put another character who's also a test case. Sakim. In each case, it's very, very difficult to move between in class and status. And there are very high prices to be paid for those who try and fail. And even for those who try and succeed, it's an expensive business making those movements. Did you draw from in writing about these lives that are essentially shaped by service? Character's defined by their proximity to power, not their actual power. Well, first of all, I was largely brought up by servants rather than by my parents. My parents who were loving and kind were very busy. And so until I was age 13 and sent off to America for school, I was largely in the care and charge and nurtured by the love of the people who worked in the household. So I saw these people very closely and loved them. I still on my wrist where the cut-out or bracelet that was given to me by the man who brought me up when I went off to boarding school at the age of 13. So certainly that was one school for learning of these characters. Here's a clip read by Daniel for the audiobook. Rustam left it dawn, eager to be in Lahore and to read a foreign newspaper. Smoking cigarette upon cigarette, lighting one each time for the driver. Rustam felt his anxieties fade as he left the farm behind. It would have been unthinkable for a driver to smoke in front of his grandfather or even his father. The only child of an only child sure to inherit the property. Rustam should never have been sent abroad, certainly not for boarding school as well as college. Even as a teenager, he had been aware of the vultures circling around. The boy too soft, too manoured, too westernised. Daniel, that was you reading from your novel. So your family are a land-owning family in Pakistan and you've managed that family estate. So the farm life that we get so many insights into during the course of your novel, I am assuming contains a lot of your own life experiences. I wondered if you could talk about that. Absolutely. After I finished college, my father advised me to either. that either I would have to give up the land that I was going to inherit or that I would have to go back and fight for it. Because it was very far remote in the countryside and the people who were managing it for my father had effectively declared independence. So I went back there and I'd spent, you know, I've lived up my farm more than I've lived anywhere else. I've lived many places. And that is certainly been even more than my childhood, has been the school for these stories, all of the relationships. It's not like a business in the sense that many of the people who work on the farm also live on the farm. So it's a community and I'm a member of that community. And in the course of doing that, I've learned lots of stories, heard lots of stories, met many people. And these are the people who people my book. Have you been cheated in the same way that some of these people cheat you? Really? Less and less and less I like to hope. Certainly at the beginning it was remarkable how clueless I was. I've been abroad for more than 10 years and my most important years is my teenage years. So when I showed up there, I knew absolutely nothing about farming or Pakistan or anything. And these guys went to town on me as they say. And having lived extensively in both Pakistan, the United States and other places too, how do your multiple perspectives shape the way that you tell stories? It's at the heart of how I tell stories. I'm a translator. My job is to translate through a very complex chemical process to translate a very unfamiliar terrain into a very familiar terrain in a way that it seems familiar at a really intimate and profound level to my readers. So that I could not do that without having the perspectives that I have. And particularly the Western perspective that I have. I've been educated abroad. I've spent a lot of time abroad. My mother is American. And because of this perspective that I have, I'm able to hold that thing in my hand and pull it out. Hold and hold in front of their reader and say, look at this and look at how it's like what you are and what your life is. I don't know whether you can see the wonderful Bodisha, the mighty Bodisha, who is our cultural critic this week. She's in the studio with me. Can you see me? I can see you. Excellent. Over to you, Bodisha. I just had a question because I know you're worked very well through your short fiction. And I wondered how it would come to be that you're now presenting us with the full scale novel. Because I am speaking as a devotee of short fiction and in particular, have yours. Well, partly it was accidental. Partly it was intentional. You know, I didn't want, if I just published another book of short stories, it would have been not very interesting. I think it's much having written those short stories and I stand behind them. But I wanted to do something different and I think this is very different. I don't know of another book at all that has the structure that this book has. It's somewhere hybrid between a book of short stories or novellas and a novel. I am interested to find that everybody calls it a novel and I'm delighted by that. But it's much more complicated than being simply a novel and that's intentional. Daniel, thank you so very much for talking to us on the art cellar today. Thank you very much for having me. Daniel Muonuddin and his novel is This is Where the Serpent Lives. You're listening to the art cellar from the BBC World Service. I'm Nikki Bady to another debut novelist who has also been making waves this year, albeit in a different genre. Shantao is the Chinese Canadian author of The Poet Empress, an epic fantasy novel which celebrates female empowerment and the power of words. Though this is the first book Shantao has published, it's not the first that she's written as she told the BBC's Sarah Cox. So I have been writing for as long as I can remember since I was a child basically and this is actually my ninth novel that I've written. And so before The Poet Empress there were eight novels hidden away in the dusty quarter. Let's get to the Poet Empress then. Please introduce us to Where In. Where In is a 16 year old daughter of a rice farmer and she is living in a famine stricken empire called the fictional Azalea dynasty. And the world is just harrowing and full of famine. So the only way she sees to say her family is to volunteer herself as concubine to the cruel son of the emperor to be a concubine. Okay, and you mentioned, I mean she goes through a lot, doesn't she weigh in? Some pages are hard to read. It's an epic fantasy story. It's a genre that you've always been a fan of and you've always wanted to write in. Yeah, absolutely. I've been a fantasy fan ever since I was young and that was the primary genre I wrote in. A lot of those unpublished books were in fantasy and although I did dabble a little bit in science fiction. But fantasy was my first and always love. And if I mentioned the R word, how do you feel about romanticism? Do you think it falls into that genre too? I think that is a really interesting question. It's a bit of a gray area. I think whether this book fits into romanticism or not, I will say it is a love story. I think that is a little category if it's a lot more cleanie into it. It is a story about love. The premise of the story is that way the young village girl needs to eventually write a poem to kill the son of the future emperor who is a cruel and evil man. And to do that she has to learn poetry magic in secret in a world where women are not allowed to read and write. So she has to learn to do that in the shadows of the court and then eventually write a poem that will kill him. And the poem, the catch is that poem has to be written with love. So it does center love and love of all kinds, not necessarily romantic love. There's also love of family, love of community and love that one human might experience for another human just by knowing them deeply. So I would say it's a love story but not necessarily a romanticist. Shentau, Bodisha, Shentau spoke there about romanticism. That is the combination of romance and fantasy. And it's become a really hot genre in the world in the last few years. What is it and why is it having such a moment? What are you showing me? I'm reading romanticist at the moment. I'm just handing you. So I have got a very cheesy YA novel that's got two unbelievably good looking guys on the front. Well, I'm a beautiful one in the middle. Is that a woman? That's a lady. Okay, so this says boys with sharp teeth do we think it could be vampires? We don't know yet. I'm halfway through. I think they're either vampires or some kind of very hot zombie that doesn't look like it's got leprosy because to this young female protagonist they are both equally attractive and that is what romanticist is. So this says their wicked. She's worse. Precisely. That's all you need from a book and that's the heart of romanticist. It is pure fantasy mixed in with a little bit of flirtation. And if you can get multiple equally beautiful guys to fight over you, that's what the reader/protagonist greatly enjoys. Okay, so what do you think Shen was so reluctant to use the phrase romanticy? I mean like you, she's a long time fantasy fiction fan. So is it something that's looking like? down upon in that world as a sort of selling out? Romance readers and writers have always been looked down upon by the cultural elite, let's say. It's always seen as being silly, as being feminized, as being silly because it's feminized, so lots of women like it, so it must be basically trash. And so it didn't have cultural capital until readers started voting with their feet in their wallets and going to bookshops and droves and saying, "Look, who gives a hoot about this? I like it, so I'm going to buy it, and so now the real power in publishing is the Romantasy writer, but it still carries a little bit of that taint and that stigma, but I think that we should all, as readers and writers, just completely reclaim it." Well, you have? Flying that flag. Thank you, Bodisha. The photographer Peter Huja was an influential figure in the New York cultural scene of the 1970s. His significance, though, was only really appreciated outside his close circles after he died with AIDS in 1987. A new film called Peter Huja's Day, starring British actors Ben Wysher in the title role of Rebecca Hall as his close friend Linda Rosencrantz, zooms in on a snapshot of a tragically short life. US director Ira Sacks spoke to the BBC's Kirsty Walk, who asked him when he first came across Huja's now famous black and white photos. It was in the early 1990s. I was aware of the work of David Runner-Rovitch, who was a very close partner friend, lover, and mentee of of Peters, and I read about Peter and then in early 1990, I saw a gallery show of his work and as soon as I saw the work, I felt invited into a community that I wanted to somehow be a part of. And his close friend, the writer Linda Rosencrantz, wanted to do a series of interviews with people about what artists do all day. So she recorded a sound interview with Peter Huja about the day in his life. The tapes are gone, but how did you come to get the transcripts? Well, much of Peter's work is in the Morgan Library here in New York. They hold the archive. And Linda found this transcription that she had typed out in 1974 of this conversation between her and Peter. And this was maybe three or four years ago and she donated it to the Morgan. A young graduate student was in the library, found this transcription and suggested to two friends of his that they publish it as a book. So I discovered the book in 2021 in a gay bookstore in Paris, France, when I was shooting passages with Ben Wischau. And by the time I'd finished reading the book, I thought, oh, this could be a very interesting project for he and I to start. I stay in bed till I live in '45 and then I put my clothes on. I thought you hadn't taken them off. Oh, I guess I didn't. I just lied. Famously, you never rehearse. But the pacing between Ben Wischau and Rebecca Hall officers editing as Linda is like music. How did they work together? Well, I will say that Ben felt when he was memorizing this text, which is quite extensive. He had 55 pages of dialogue to memorize. That it was like memorizing an improvised piece of music. Because it includes every comma, every time he goes forward and back every readjustment of the language. So it is more like music in a way than it is like dialogue. Peter Hughes, our dive far too young from a terrible disease that stigmatized gay men in particular. What have you taken away from the process of going to know Peter and his work more intimately? Yeah, I guess for me, there is a more infall element to the film. And it's something we didn't talk a lot about AIDS or death and the making of it, but we felt something that was passing too quickly. This was 1974. Peter died in 1987. So 13 years later, he was gone. And there were no new Peter Hughes' photographs. So the kind of finality of the day and of the life was very present for us. Irocex talking about his film, Peter Hujal's Day. For Disha, I know you've seen the film, but what is it about Peter Hujal's work that speaks to you? Peter Hujal's body of work is completely extraordinary, all the more so because he was not a successful artist in his lifetime. And yet he didn't lose hope. His work is very cohesive in the sense that it is intimate, personal. It's very humane, but it's not over flattering. He's not trying to make his subjects look very beautiful or very glamorous. As it happens, they are very beautiful glamorous and deeply charismatic because he attracted artists and writers and thinkers, whoever passed through his apartment, posed for him, very relaxed, very frank, a lot of skin, a lot of nudity, a lot of emotional expression. And despite not really getting a huge amount of encouragement from the outer world, he carried on. So the film is that private quiet side of him, where he's in his apartment with his friend and they're talking as artists do. Artists don't always know that they're very good. They don't always know that they're geniuses. They're often full of doubt. They're very fragile. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know that they're about to become famous posthumously. So I own two Badeeshya black and white photographs. Will my family who inherit my possessions, perhaps be sitting on something that we will be describing in similar ways in the years to come? That's my absolute fantasy as an artist. I think every visual artist has a secret hope that just one thing of ours will last forever and ever and ever. Thank you, Badeeshya. Finally on today's Arts Air Music from Scottish Egyptian siblings, the IU sisters who recently performed live at the BBC. I love how in their classical music they bring both Celtic and Arabic influences to their arrangements. Here they are, talking to Nulum Agavan about their musical upbringing. Well, I mean we're very proud to be Egyptian and we're been listening to Arabic music since we were very young. Our parents did a very good job of kind of introducing us to different kinds of music, but obviously being born and raised in Glasgow, you are surrounded by Scottish traditional music and of course we were educated in a very meticulous Western classical way. So we had both inspirations growing up and I think what we're doing now is very much a combination of our Western classical training and kind of British education, but as well our Arabic love and heritage. Now I was looking last night at your video for a song you're going to play for a cinema moment. El Helwadi? Oh very good. And it means the sweet one, the beautiful one. Absolutely. That beautiful, it Helwadi, beautiful, so it's like a female article, El Helwadi, beautiful woman. And the video that you made for that is so dramatic. And where were you because you have this beautiful dramatic landscape that is a desert landscape and then you go into a city or a town meeting people who were just delighted to see you. Where was that? So the beautiful sand scape and the river was in Il Fayum which is the Western desert, just west of Cairo and the Hassan Basel was downtown. Cairo town. Oh that's downtown Cairo, yeah everybody delighted to see you. I better let you get over to your instruments and I'm going to let people know that Sarah is on cello. We have Laura on violin. El Helwadi from their album Arabesque. I will stop talking and I will let these ladies take over. The IU Sisters and that's it for this week's El Sour. Thank you for your ears and thank you to both my guests, Videsha and Danielle Moumanuddin. For now for me Nikki Baydie studio managers Emma Hart and Sue Mayo and producers, Kiran Birmingham and Nikki Paxman. See you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]