The Verb - Helen Dunmore, Ruth Fainlight, Santiago Roncagliolo

Ian McMillan presents Radio 3's cabaret of the word, featuring the best poetry and new writing. This week Ian's guests include Helen Dunmore, who reads a brand new commission written specially for the programme. Known as a novelist, poet and writer for children, Helen Dunmore has created a geeky futuristic romance for The Verb. The distinguished poet Ruth Fainlight describes how it feels to have fifty years' worth of your writing collected in a single, weighty volume. The Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo describes writing fiction in the shadow of the Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. And, with the Columbian writer Oscar Guardiola-Rivera gives an insight into the changing literature of his homeland and Latin America more widely. Finally, 100 years to the month after Virginia Woolf said that human character changed irrevocably in December 1910, her biographer Hermione Lee joins Ian to explain why.