Agatha Christie is the world's most translated author, with her work being available in over 100 languages. And one of her most beloved characters, Miss Marple, is about to be resurrected with the help of 12 contemporary authors. In The Studio talks to two of those writers: Dreda Say Mitchell who specialises in a different type of crime story, the gritty gangster genre, and Kate Mosse, who is known for her historical sagas. They reveal how they rose to the challenge of reinventing one of the...

Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel Hamnet was published in 2020 to great critical acclaim, winning the Women's Prize. It tells the story of a gifted herbalist, Agnes Hathaway, who is married to a young William Shakespeare. We follow her on her journey as they meet, marry, and later come to terms with the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Now, the Royal Shakespeare Company is putting Hamnet on stage for the first time in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon. Presenter Dan...

Beyond Belief - The Life And Mission Of John Hume is a new drama musical about the Irish politician who was one of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace process. Marie-Louise Muir goes behind the scenes of the production staged in Hume's home city of Derry with its director Kieran Griffiths. She follows his young company of actors rehearsing for a major production which will be streamed live globally on the 25th anniversary of the signing of the historic peace accord, the Good Friday...

The poet Nikita Gill has written several volumes of poetry, and enjoys engaging poetically with her audience using social media. Her work often explores Greek Myths, and her latest project continues with that theme as she embarks on a series of four books, each one focusing on a single goddess. For this episode of In The Studio, we join her as she starts with Hekate, often known as the Goddess of Witchcraft, and about whom little is known, other than that she was brought up in the underworld...

Nick Duncalf meets artist Theo Jansen at his studio in Delft, as he creates his latest Strandbeests, multi-legged creatures designed to walk the sands of Holland’s North Sea coast. Outside his workshop, the grass is littered with bleached plastic pipes; the skeletons of strandbeests past. He has been building these creatures for decades. Each year, new creatures - some the size of shopping trolleys, some the size of cars - are designed, tested, and allowed to run free across the sands. At a...

Author Sofi Oksanen shares with Olga Smirnova how she begins a new novel. Olga witnesses how Sofi painstakingly gathers details for the lives of her characters, from choosing the colour of their nail varnish, to the perfumes they prefer, and the difference in the smell of Estonian and Soviet women. Olga visits Sofi’s writing studio in a bohemian quarter of Helsinki where they both listen to the silence which is so important for Sofi to write. We discover why sometimes kneading dough and...

Faig Ahmed is one of Azerbaijan’s best-known contemporary artists, and has won international acclaim for his fantastical woven artworks. Based on Azerbaijan’s ancient carpet weaving traditions, his pieces explore the visual language of classic rug design to radical effect. Pieces can distort and bulge, grow deep-tufted pelts or rise off the walls into the gallery space overhead. His work has been described as psychedelic, surreal, even iconoclastic. Speaking from his weaving workshop in Baku,...

A poet can’t sleep. She sits at a desk in a wooden house at the heart of a palm forest, watching the night sky through the window. The full moon lights up the palm fronds, which dance in the wind. She has been tasked with writing a poem that will be sent into space, to another planet’s distant moon. What should she say? What is the message in a bottle that she should launch out into the solar system? How can she begin writing a poem that speaks of the fragile wonders of our home planet? That...

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning Vietnamese writer whose debut novel The Mountains Sing, published in English in 2020, won the International Book Awards in 2021 and was runner-up in the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It portrays the lives of four generations of a Vietnamese family enduring many hardships, something she understands well from her own upbringing. In conversation with presenter Felicity Finch, Quế Mai shares her writing process as she works on her second novel Dust Child,...

Restaurateur Keith McNally is a 71-year-old Londoner, the son of a longshoreman and office cleaner, who moved to New York in 1976. Forty-five years later, he is one of the most celebrated restaurateurs in the city. In 2004, The New York Times dubbed him “the restaurateur who invented Downtown.” In this episode of In the Studio, we get a glimpse into the mind of this unique creative talent, who used his early career in film and theatre to dominate an altogether different stage. The flagship of...

Sydney’s main public art museum, the Art Gallery of NSW, recently completed Sydney Modern, a massive expansion project ten years in the making. Almost doubling the existing exhibition space, the new building was designed by the Pritzker Architecture Prize winning Japanese firm SANAA. Positioned within verdant parkland, yet a mere stone’s throw from the city centre, the new gallery is a series of interconnected glass–encased pavilions that seem to cascade down an incline towards Sydney...

Denise Mina meets comic book artist Frank Quitely in his Glasgow studio. Frank is one of the biggest names in the comic world, responsible for drawing superheroes like Superman and Batman & Robin alongside his latest collaboration with writer Mark Millar “Jupiter’s Legacy”. Starting on Scottish underground cult comic 'Electric Soup' he progressed to working for Judge Dredd magazine and then The New X-Men gathering an international reputation. As he completes the final few pages of comic...

Since the 1980s, composer Kaija Saariaho has been lauded for her explorations of sound and music, from tape and live electronics mixed with layered orchestral textures, to opera, song cycles and smaller scale pieces. In the BBC Music Magazine’s top 20 composers of all time, Kaija Saariaho is the only one alive today; as she moves into her eighth decade, there’s no sign that she wants to stop creating the magical sounds she has become known for. Kaija was born in Helsinki in Finland, but since...

It's estimated that over one billion people worldwide watch the Sydney fireworks display every New Year's Eve. Regina Botros goes behind the scenes of this global event, finding out about the process of putting on an unforgettable light show and the pressures of living up to the expectations of a mass audience. She learns why the team think of the Sydney skyline as their canvas.

Follow renowned theatre and opera director Richard Jones as he creates a brand new production of Handel’s magical opera Alcina for the Royal Opera House. When Handel composed this opera, he was inspired not only by the possibilities of a new theatre in the heart of London, but also by his collaborator John Rich, who encouraged him to incorporate magic and dance into this new work. Nearly 300 years on, Richard Jones is also inspired by the possibilities of this opera, and with the...

David Galullo is the world’s leading designer of futuristic workspaces for the forward-thinking tech giants of northern California. But in a post-pandemic world, how will our homes and work co-exist? Nick Duncalf follows Galullo and his team as they create inspirational new work environments that keep pace with our new lives.

Looking back over a year of In The Studio, we consider the role of the artist's muse. Why does one subject suggest itself above all others, how does an artist then go about incorporating that subject into their work, and what, if any, are the pressures they feel? From Nitin Sawney’s latest work marking the 60th anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem; through Sally Beamish, whose Proms composition was inspired by bees; to Yuri Herrera’s historical novel about Mexican leader Benito...

Žygimantas Kudirka is Lithuania’s leading spoken-word artist and agent provocateur. A prolific writer and creative artist, he has won Europe’s Best Slam Poet as well as multiple hip-hop awards, blending satire and social critique with dystopian and futurist themes. Žygimantas, who goes by the alias MC Messiah, is shaking up the scene with a new libretto for the opera Brave New Body, teaming up with avant-garde composer Arturas Bumšteinas. Kudirka’s texts play with the idea of the human body...

Sean Rafferty spends time in the company of the pianist Lang Lang, one of the most famous classical musicians in the world today. He has had a hugely creative, successful and glamorous career, performing all over the world and collaborating with musicians from Herbie Hancock to Sir Simon Rattle. But during his private time, Lang Lang has spent 20 years of deep study and personal reflection on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach’s Goldberg Variations is the musical peak that many major...

In 2009, Jessie Burton visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where she saw something that went on to transform her life. Petronella Oortman's doll's house became the inspiration for Jessie's debut novel, The Miniaturist, which was published five years later and went on to become an international bestseller. Eight years on from this success, as its sequel is published, Jessie takes Vic James back to the days when she began writing it. A time when she was doing office jobs by day, whilst trying...

Production designer Maria Djurkovic takes us behind the scenes of Harry Styles' new movie, My Policeman, which was made in the middle of the pandemic. Lockdown presents a number of challenges, expected ones like social distancing and sick crew members. And unexpected ones, like studios being too full and staff being in short supply because more movies were being made during the pandemic, rather than less. Maria kept an audio diary during these unprecedented times for the British film...

What if you could rewrite a part of history? What would you change, and where would you start? For multidisciplinary artist Nazanin Moradi, who was brought up in the Islamic Republic of Iran where women are, “second-class citizens in every sense,” the answer is easy; she would start at the very beginning of “time” to reverse the “unfair” gender roles. In her new project, the multidisciplinary artist challenges male domination and toxic masculinity, within a fragmented historical context where...

Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf takes us behind the scenes of the making of Kandahar, his film about life in Afghanistan that captured the world's attention when President Bush asked to see it after the attacks on 9/11. He reveals how he managed to film on a smugglers' route between Iran and Afghanistan, and how he avoided the attentions of the Taliban. And he also reveals details of the documentary he is currently making about the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan.

Jarvis Cocker, the British indie pop star and frontman of the band Pulp, talks to Miranda Sawyer about his autobiography that's not an autobiography. Good Pop, Bad Pop is an inventory of all the stuff that's in his loft: badges, pencils, photographs, chewing gum, etc. But it's also about the memories that are stirred by those objects and seeing them for the first time in decades. He reveals the process of writing the Sheffield version of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.