Woman's Hour

The Country Girls by the Irish author Edna O’ Brien was banned by the Irish Censorship Board and burn publically in her hometown when it was first published in the 1960’s. This story of female friendship and the restrictions of rural Irish life for women became a best seller and the first of a trilogy now recognised as an iconic work of twentieth century Irish fiction. BBC Radio 4 is dramatizing all three books and Jenni speaks to Lin Coghlan who has adapted it for radio and the literary critic Alex Clark about the impact of the trilogy and why the description of female friendship and female experience feels contemporary even 50 years after the books were published. For the last two years hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have left their homes in Myanmar and made a perilous journey to refugee camps in Bangladesh. They’re Rohingya Muslims. They have their own language and culture but the government of Myanmar, a Buddhist country, refuses to recognize them. The first exodus began two years a