Synopsis
Writer Damian Barr and Egyptologist Joann Fletcher join Harriett Gilbert to talk about their favourite books. Under discussion are Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Color Purple.
The Essay | Malorie Blackman on The Color Purple
Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman on how Alice Walker's novel ''The Color Purple'' legitimised her need to be a writer. She writes how the novel was ''about the triumph of the human spirit''. Reading it for the first in her early 20s it ''blasted open a door which I thought was locked and barred to me. Actually it blasted open a door which I didn't appreciate even existed. A door that could lead to a writing career of my own... this book and its author showed that it was possible for me to not only be an author but to have my own voice.''
Novels That Shaped Our World | A Woman's Place
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is another case in point - now seen as an icon of African-American women's writing, its reprinting was promoted by one of the most significant novelists of the last few decades, Alice Walker, author of the lacerating The Color Purple. The episode brings the discussion right up to date with a novel from 2019 by a black British writer and about a black British woman, Candice Carty-Williams' Queenie.