Clare Hall PhD student in English Jade Cuttle appeared on BBC Radio 4’s flagship discussion programme Start the Week on Monday 28 September, joining Poet Laureate Simon Armitage in conversation with presenter Tom Sutcliffe.

Recorded in front of an audience at the Contains Strong Language Festival in Salford, the programme brought together discussions of poetry ancient and new, the history of writing, found objects and the ways in which language survives through time. Jade spoke about her work as Writer-in-Residence at London’s new Museum of Writing, undertaken as an AHRC-funded research placement alongside her doctoral studies at Cambridge.

The conversation explored Jade’s fascination with the physical traces left behind by writing and human lives, from ancient inscribed materials to objects recovered through mudlarking. This connected closely with Simon Armitage’s discussion of his new verse translation of Gilgamesh, whose surviving text was reconstructed from ancient cuneiform clay tablets. Jade and Simon reflected on the relationship between language, earth, material objects and deep time, and on the ways poetry can give new life to what survives from the past.

Jade also shared a first discussion of her forthcoming Faber poetry collection, which draws directly on her PhD research into British global majority nature poets. She read from the collection during the programme and reflected on themes of landscape, identity, memory and material culture.

It was wonderful to see Jade sharing both her research and creative work with such a wide audience. Once again, we warmly congratulate her on the appearance on BBC Radio and look forward to following the next stages of her work.

Listen to the full episode of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00323y3