Threats to the natural world are the focus of today’s conversation. Adam Rutherford talks to wildlife biologist Jonathan Slaght, novelist Juhea Kim and criminal psychologist Julia Shaw.Jonathan Slaght discusses Tigers Between Empires, his account of the international effort to save the Siberian tiger from extinction in the wake of the Cold War. Juhea Kim’s short story collection A Love Story from the End of the World imagines lives lived in precarious balance with nature, from biodomes in Seoul to landfill islands in the Pacific. Dr Julia Shaw’s Green Crime investigates the psychology behind environmental destruction, profiling the perpetrators of ecological harm and the people fighting to stop them.Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez
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Storytelling: Jeanette Winterson, Rory Stewart and Soweto Kinch
In her latest novel, One Aladdin Two Lamps, the writer Jeanette Winterson takes inspiration from the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights. But she calls on the reader to look again at stories we think we know, unpick how fiction works, and have the courage to challenge and change the narrative.The saxophonist and presenter Soweto Kinch will perform his new album, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, with the London Symphony Orchestra (at the Barbican, London, on Friday 14th November), combining British jazz, hip-hop and orchestral music. This is the finale of his acclaimed trilogy of politically charged, genre-defying works that tell different stories of the past, present and future. The former MP Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade in Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and Borders, and wrote a column for a local newspaper. In Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders he’s collected together these fragmentary moments from rural life and local politics to capture a wide-ranging portrait of life and stories from the Cumbrian countryside. Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez
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Crossing genres with Wayne McGregor
The internationally renowned choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor swaps stage for gallery in a landmark exhibition exploring his multifaceted career at Somerset House (from 30 Oct 2025–22 Feb 2026). ‘Infinite Bodies’ investigates how Wayne McGregor has combined body, movement and cutting-edge digital technologies to redefine perceptions of physical intelligence. Throughout the gallery space he draws together designers, musicians, engineers and dancers to bring the artworks to life.The Booker prize winning novelist Anne Enright is in the studio to talk about her latest work, ‘Attention, Writing on Life, Art and the World’. Unlike her fiction, in these essays, Enright speaks directly to the reader, elucidating her thoughts on everything from family history to Irish politics and the control of women, to new perspectives on literary legends. There’s a screen idol at the heart of Tanika Gupta’s new play, Hedda (at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, until 22nd November). Inspired by the life of Anglo-Indian film star Merle Oberon, Gupta sets her play just after India’s independence and transforms Ibsen’s classic into a story about power, identity and representation.Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez
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Maps – lost, secret and revealing
The Library of Lost Maps by James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, tells the story of the discovery of a treasure-trove at the heart of University College London. In a long-forgotten room James found thousands of maps and atlases. This abandoned archive reveals how maps have traced the contours of the world, inspiring some of the greatest scientific discoveries, as well as leading to terrible atrocities and power grabs. But maps have not always been used to navigate or reveal the world, according to a new exhibition at the British Library on Secret Maps (from 24 October 2025 to 18 January 2026). Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and author of Four Points of the Compass, explains how mysterious maps throughout history have been used to hide, shape and control knowledge. The biographer Jenny Uglow celebrates a different kind of mapping in her new book, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer. In 1781 the country curate Gilbert White charted the world around him – from close observation of the weather, to the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming harvest – revealing a natural map of his Hampshire village.Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez
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Endangered languages and vanishing landscapes
Of the 7,000 languages estimated to exist, half will have disappeared by the end of this century. That’s the stark warning from the Director of the Endangered Languages Archive, Mandana Seyfeddinipur. The evolution of languages, and their rise and fall, is part of human history, but the speed at which this is happening today is unprecedented. Mandana will be appearing at the inaugural Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages at the Barbican in October. A sense of loss also runs through Sverker Sörlin’s love letter to snow. The professor of Environmental History in Stockholm writes about the infinite variety of water formulations, frozen in air, in ‘Snö: A History’ (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma), and his fears about the vanishing white landscapes of his youth.In the Arctic the transformation from frozen desert into an international waterway is gathering pace. Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London and with co-author Mia Bennett sets out the fight and the future of the Arctic in ‘Unfrozen’. While territorial contest and resource exploitation is causing tensions within the region, there is also potential for new ways of working, from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies.Producer: Katy Hickman
Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez
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