Two authors take their inspiration from Shakespeare and create something entirely new. This month’s podcast looks at transformations and allows you the listener to be in at least two places at once. Recorded at the Cheltenham and Manchester Literary Festivals and London’s Southbank Centre, we hear from Margaret Atwood about her new novel Hag-Seed whilst she also teaches Alex Clark how to rap. Ian McEwan tells us more about Nutshell and we get to hear readings from both. Plus an interview with digital artist Zach Lieberman who allows people to interact with the very words on the page.

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Margaret Atwood – Hag-Seed

Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging aTempestlike no other. It will boost his reputation. It will heal emotional wounds.

Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. Also brewing revenge.

After twelve years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on hisTempestand snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall?

Ian McEwan – Nutshell

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She’s still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John. Instead, she’s with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb.

Told from a perspective unlike any other,Nutshellis a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

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