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Transcript鈥痮f the Free Thinking episode in which Rana Mitter talks to the 6 authors shortlisted for the 2022 British Academy Prize for Global Understanding听听

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Hello, Swedish villagers, female killers from Santiago and the man who tried to abolish deafness. They're all in our sights today because we like to take on the big ones here at Free Thinking, and you can't get much bigger than global cultural understanding. That's the theme for the prize for the best book of the Year, which helps cultures to understand each other - it's sponsored by the British Academy, the UK Champion for Humanities and Social Sciences, and it's worth a cool 拢25,000, which should certainly help to grease the wheels of understanding rather nicely.鈥�听

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Today I'm joined by 6 authors shortlisted for the prize, with six varied books that bring different answers to the question 鈥淗ow can one culture understand another?鈥濃��听

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Well, let me get straight to it with my first author, James Poskett, author of Horizons, a Global History of Science.鈥�听

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James it鈥檚 certainly a subject which we might think almost transcends cultures, and yet it's very much embedded in them too. So I want you to take us to a very different time and place. It's the Aztec empire in Central America and you start the book with the city of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztec Empire, which you describe as an engineering miracle that was built in 1325.鈥疭o James explain that engineering miracle for us and also explain why that was your go to point for starting a global history of science.鈥�听

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James Poskett:听听

So I started in early modern Mexico, before the Spanish conquest, to give a sense of the world of science outside of Europe.鈥� And this city, what becomes Mexico City, has waterways that are connected by aqueducts. There are advanced medicinal markets, there's maps, botanical gardens, astronomers. There's a population that's in excess of London from the 14th century.鈥� So you really have a capital city that's comparable in terms of its science, medicine, engineering to that you find in Europe. And I wanted to defamiliarize the story we have about how science became modern by starting.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter: And when you say global history of science in your title, you really mean it. One of the most fascinating elements of the early modern era, as you describe it, is mathematics in the kingdoms of West Africa, parts of what's now Nigeria, in fact. And as you point out, sub-Saharan Africa very rarely makes it into big histories of science.鈥� When we bring this mathematical work from cities like Kano and Timbuktu into the history of world science, what does that do to change our understanding?鈥�听

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James: So I very deliberately wanted not only Africa to feature in this global history of science, but to not feature simply as a story of slavery, and additionally for it not to feature as a disconnected place, but a remarkably connected place in the early modern world. So the sorts of stories that people might be familiar with in terms of astronomy and mathematics, being advanced in mediaeval and early modern China or the Islamic world. That's a story which is literally physically connected also to sub-Saharan Africa and particularly West Africa, where you have these incredibly wealthy kingdoms, these rulers who are patronising the sciences. They are paying for astronomers and mathematicians to import works from across the Sahara. They are paying them to predict when certain festivals should be held, when the agricultural cycle should be renewed. So those stories that we tell about not the Eurasian world are also compatible in sub-Saharan Africa. It's only with the advent of European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, that both those kingdoms begin to be demolished, but also the knowledge of that science and the kind of history of science of that region comes to be forgotten very deliberately in the European context.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter: OK, but might that not be a bit of pushback with people saying so - it's great to celebrate these wider stories, particularly less known parts.鈥疊ut in the end, doesn't the global story of science converge over the past two centuries? You mentioned Chinese and Islamic science, both highly original in many ways, but in the end they get brought under the umbrella of what you could broadly call the Western scientific world.鈥�听

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James: There's an element of truth to that, but what you're describing is a form of power, not a form of knowledge. So it's true that resources are concentrated in Europe and later the United States by the mid late 19th century. So to train in the sciences, if you're Chinese or Japanese or Indian, you often have to come to the where the resources are, much like in the present actually, but of course we're talking about global cultural understanding. And it's not true that there's a unique European culture that produces these scientific ideas. In fact, what I argue in my book is that the cultures of places like India and China and Japan and South America -these are extremely important in fertilising and cross fertilising the kinds of science that we think of as typically modern, including in the high age of empire, including in the late 19th century where you have people like Bengali polymaths who are both chemists, and experts in Hindu scripture, Prafulla Chandra Ray for example, a late 19th century Indian chemist or you have people like his contemporary Jagadish Chandra Bose who was both committed to a form of Hinduism - Brahmanism - but thought this was really important and indeed was right in terms of his understanding of the nature of radio waves and the life of plants.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter: There are many scientists in the book who aren't well known to the Western world.鈥�听

One of them was CV Rahman, the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize for Science, in fact possibly the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize for Science. What makes his contribution so distinctive?鈥�听

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James: He was an expert in quantum mechanics, and he gave a fundamentally different explanation of why the sea is blue so he was travelling across the Mediterranean, actually, on the way back from a conference in Oxford, and he was looking at the sea.鈥疉nd he'd read the Victorian textbooks, which told him, well, the sea is blue because it reflects this colour of the sky and the Mediterranean, and he suddenly realised that this this was wrong, basically that this wasn't why the sea appears blue. It's because of some of the ways in which the light is shifted at a quantum level.鈥疕e was also a real institution builder, so he helped establish new institutions for doing science in India. And a lot of these, particularly 20th century scientists in the early 20th century in places like India, were very concerned with building up their own scientific institutions, their own scientific capacity, often quite explicitly, as part of an anti-colonial movement. That's what it meant to be independent, to do independent science.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter:听 I'd like to bring in another writer on science here, Katie Booth and Katie, your book is the invention of miracles and you deal with one of the best-known scientists in recent history, Alexander Graham Bell.鈥� But it's not his invention of the telephone that you concentrate on. It's his complex relationship with deafness, and you subtitle the book 鈥渉is quest to end deafness鈥� and you are very critical of this quest of Bell鈥檚. You even make comparisons in the introduction with Hitler. What angered you so much about Alexander Graham Bell that it drove you to write this book?鈥�听

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Katie Booth: Well, I grew up in a family that had genetic hereditary deafness, my grandparents were deaf. My great grandparents, my great aunts and uncle.鈥疉nd while most people in the hearing world know of Bell as the inventor of the telephone, that was almost a footnote in my education about Bell Bell was known to me from a young age as someone who tried to obliterate cultural deafness, he tried to end the use of sign language among deaf people, which is, I would argue, a form of ethnocide.鈥疕e tried to discourage deaf people from marrying each other and having children as a way to control hereditary deafness.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter:听 Several people close to Alexander Graham Bell were deaf themselves. How did those relationships, which came through friends and family, affect his thinking about deafness?鈥�听

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Katie:听

So Bell's mother was deaf and his wife was deaf. Those were the two closest people to him who were deaf, although he had other deaf friends.鈥疊oth his mother and his wife lost their hearing after they had already developed language and speech. His wife had started to develop speech but hadn't developed it very much, his mother, on the other hand, had.听 She knew how to speak and she was part of the hearing world growing up and so he had this idea that this was possible for all deaf people and he didn't do a very good job of modulating that idea for, for example, people who were born deaf, like most of the people in my family.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter:听 It's clear that this was something that Alexander Graham Bell himself pushed forward, but it was by no means only him.鈥�听 Because, again, a lot of people will be familiar with the fact that eugenics was an extremely widespread way of thinking about many aspects of development in the early 20th century in the US in Western Europe, and this extended, perhaps more than people have realised, to deaf people during that time as well.鈥�听

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Katie:听 Yes, absolutely. There were a lot of these ideas just sort of in the water, so to speak.鈥� There were laws about sterilisation, there were laws about intermarriage.鈥疊ell was a figure in that conversation, but a very complicated figure, more complicated than I realised when I was young. He did believe that deaf people shouldn't intermarry, but he didn't believe that there should be laws restricting it, and he did not argue for sterilisation either.鈥疊ut he was a really dominant figure in spreading the idea that deaf people should be brought under the sort of umbrella of hearing ways of being and that they shouldn't have their own separate culture.鈥疉nd by spreading those ideas, which he was able to do in large part because of his fame and notoriety over the telephone, he sort of ushered in and fostered a way of thinking about deafness, which was that deaf people could be quote unquote 鈥渘ormalised鈥� or sort of brought into the hearing world.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter:听 And there's one figure who even now is well known, the famous deaf blind activist Helen Keller who is an ally to Bell in his quest, and perhaps to the surprise of many readers, she ain't. She's at least, as you portray her, at least partly on the pro eugenics side. How does that come about?鈥�听

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Katie:听 Helen Keller's father finds his way to Bell when she's a girl, before she's had much education and shortly after she became deaf, blind. And so Bell ends up playing this sort of pivotal role in designing her education, you know, he, for all of his faults, he really whenever a deaf child came to his doorstep, he really focused on that child and really wanted to help. And so he sort of pulls Helen Keller onto his lap and over the course of years they become friends. And so there is this sort of direct line of eugenics ideas, Bell was pretty big in the world of eugenics and pretty early on in it.鈥疉nd so there's this direct line of those ideas to Helen Keller, and she does end up advocating for those.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter:听听

Is there any legacy in the present day in the 21st century of that century ago quest by Alexander Graham Bell to destroy language for the deaf.鈥�听

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Katie:听 Absolutely yes. There is a whole system of trying to advocate for the idea that sign language is harmful for deaf children, which has an irony that has been pointed out over and over again in the deaf world, which is that it's often framed as really good and helpful for hearing children to learn sign language as babies, but for deaf children still today, that is denied.鈥疭ometimes it is connected to technological advances like hearing aids or cochlear implants, but not always. And there's this sense that deaf people should learn English first and only. And the result of that is widespread language deprivation in the deaf community, which is a form of developmental brain damage. If you don't have language from a young age, it can damage your way of thinking, the capacity of thinking that you have, and we see that this is widespread in the deaf world and if deaf people - if deaf children are given accessible language it's fine if that's alongside English as well, but an accessible language is critical for children and for a culture.鈥�听

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Rana Mitter:听 Language is at the heart of Katie's book about understanding a very different world, a very different culture from that of the hearing world.鈥� And Jing Tsu's new book, Kingdom of Characters, is also about language and translation and a particular gene. Your book has a dilemma at its heart, traditional Chinese writing is one of the most complex, beautiful such systems in the world. But because it uses characters rather than an alphabetic system, it's one of the hardest to reproduce using modern technology as a quest to build a Chinese typewriter in the 20th century showed, and that's one episode in your book. Could you tell us a little bit about the quest to build that Chinese typewriter?鈥�听

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Jing Tsu: 鈥疻hen you think about the fundamental difference between the Chinese ideographic script and Western alphabetic script it is that one set has only 26 units that you have to worry about, after which you can build any word you like, whereas the other has thousands of characters you need if you want to be moderately literate.鈥痀ou probably need to know about 4 to 5,000, and in one of the dictionaries we have, the oldest dictionaries have, there's about 80,000 characters.鈥疉nd when I was writing this book, I was thinking to myself, as you were talking with our last speaker, you know, language makes worlds.鈥疘t colours how we think about things. How you think to yourself is as important as basically how to have an identity at all.鈥疭o imagine if you meet someone who doesn't share any of that. How do you even go about understanding, approaching, even acknowledging your differences or similarities? So for the Chinese at this point, this was compounded with the question of technology.鈥疶he typewriter how do we, what do we do with this typewriter that's customised and designed for 26 letters, not thousands of characters.鈥疉nd so early on it is actually westerners 鈥� an American Presbyterian missionary - who decided that he would take this on. And of course his idea was, well, you just give one key per character -do it through that workmanlike way. We just build this gigantic disc, we'll put all these, you know, characters on it.鈥� I think of it as more like a - what a disc jockey would do, I mean, I just dated myself back in the 80s, you know, high school prom and things like that - the disc jockey would be rolling the record while trying to do something completely with the other hand and this is what I imagined the early typewriter operators had to do. But then there was a different dilemma. Now China could have gone its own way. It could have built a machine just for idiographic writing. But at the same time, there was an alphabet was clearly dominating the global infrastructure of communications and technology, so they had to make a tough choice. We go our way and are basically isolated and have to reinvent the wheel. Or we find a way to tap into this existing alphabetic infrastructure, how to assimilate ourselves into it and eventually bend the stick back and of course ironically this story about what happens between the Ideographic alphabetic script in the modern age just so happens to be the kind of story we think about, the understanding we now have arrived at where China and the West have been for the past 200 years and where they ended up, because we're seeing at the moment where they're going their separate ways and we sort of started with this technological moment of language.鈥�听

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Rana: So, Jing, let me ask a question that follows directly from that. Why didn't the Chinese just romanise their language? I mean, of course there would be nationalist considerations, but Vietnamese, which is linguistically similar in some important ways was romanised in the 19th century, and even after, you know, the Imperial powers were kicked out of Vietnam, Vietnam has stuck with the Romanized way of writing its language. Why wouldn't China have gone that route?鈥�听

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Jing: Well, China, in fact, kind of did, because they did in fact come up with their own romanization system. They standardised what centuries of Western missionaries just kind of did ad hoc on their own, because they wanted to interface with the outside world, but it was always thought, and this is actually not well known, people will always think of Pinyin and the simplified characters as the two colours - just to explain - Pinyin is the standard system of romanising Chinese used in the present day, so a word like Beijing is in my opinion romanisation, even though I still say Peking duck obviously when I go to restaurants. These structures, the language also has its first mover advantage, where you have to constantly upset the hierarchy that had been basically habituated and China did go that route. But the whole time, if you look at what people, what people really know little about is how Chinese would survive at all costs.鈥疶his was a detour that both Romanising Chinese and simplifying it are just the bridges to eventually ensuring its survival in the modern age.鈥�听

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Rana: So was there, in the end, a termination in China which doesn't seem to exist in, say, in Vietnam, that the characters in themselves were part of a sort of national identity, a cultural identity, and that they had to be preserved in some form?鈥疶hat simply writing things in Roman letters which would be comprehensible was something that was a cultural step too far.鈥�听

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Jing: I think that's absolutely correct, and we forget how even the way we ask about well, isn't it easier to just go with something that's expedient a choice of language? And this is where we, I think, overlooked the cultural factor.鈥疶he Chinese character writing has probably more than most languages, an incredibly rich tradition that is backed by philosophical writing that is originally said that before Ice Age when he created characters, is on a night where the ghost wailed and the heavens ranked millions. So it's a really kind of a cataclysmic moment.鈥疶hat writing was going to partake in nature and it was never counterposed as something that's opposite nature when we think of Western alphabet, right?鈥疉bstract or abstracted from reality, character writing was always thought of as participating in, partaking in the larger patterns of the universe, which is why we look at what character writing really does.鈥疞ook like, you know, people say pictographic, which is kind of a false term, but it really does look like it's a bunch of patterns put together.鈥疻hen you look at character writing, it's not one letter you know, kind of in the linear fashion, one letter after the other, but rather a cluster of different parts, much of which is clearly trying to resemble or map onto some sense of reality.鈥�听

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Rana: And I'd say that one message I took from your book was that the 20th century, which was a century of mechanical technology, was pretty bad for trying to mechanise the Chinese writing system.鈥疊ut the 21st century, which turns out to be a digital century, has ended up being very advantageous as a way of using its writing system to send digital messages. Why has digital made the difference in terms of bringing Chinese back as a global language of communication?鈥�听

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Jing: Well, I think it makes a difference insofar as it was one major threshold that China managed to cross and it knew that the digital wave was the one technological wave that unlike typewriter China cannot afford to miss this one. So of all the work that they did throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s is really to make sure the Chinese language could survive in digital form no matter what.鈥疊ecause even to this day, if you think about it, everything we do, unless your language can show up on a smartphone screen or on the computer, there is there's no way of communicating. So it's really a kind of a new a new world in which language could live or die.鈥�听

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Rana: And while we're talking about China, could I tell you that you can hear more about Chinese history and culture in past Free Thinking programmes where I've talked about why sleep is a political issue in China, the links between China and Sigmund Freud, and questions about democracy and Hong Kong.鈥� I'm Rana Mitter and here on Free Thinking on 成人论坛 Radio 3 and as the 成人论坛 Arts and Ideas Podcast, I'm talking to the authors shortlisted for this year's book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding from the British Academy, the UK Champion for Humanities and Social Sciences, and in our Free Thinking archives you'll find discussions with the author shortlisted for the prize in previous years.鈥� Global cultural understanding is not just about harmony, it can also be about understanding trauma. And some of this year's authors tell stories where destruction and emergence from it is central.听听

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I also spoke to the other shortlisted author, Harold J盲hner, and he's been put on the list for Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, which tells a story that we don't often hear. Not the horrors of Nazi Germany, but the years that followed just afterward. Harold tells the story of the post war years, but there are many aspects that make for uncomfortable reading. They show that understanding a post war society is also a sort of border crossing in an era where most of us no longer have war as part of our living memories. Harold, one fascinating thing for the British reader is the reference to things that are well known in Germany, it appears, but not so much to us. So the rubble girls who formed what one American reporter called 鈥渁 human conveyor belt鈥� in the late 1940s, picking up the rubble from the ruins of the buildings which had been bombed by the Allies. So. Who were these rubble girls and what do they tell us about post war?听

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Harald: The rubble girls were normal woman. The cities were completely destroyed and because most of the men are still prisoners of war or dead, they had to clean the city by themselves and they made it, moving the rubble and the debris in long rows by buckets from the destroyed houses and down to the streets. It was a very hard work, but they were very often photographed. These pictures became very famous in Germany because they are visual metaphors of togetherness and solidarity in a time. Where solidarity was a very rare quality. But very much needed.听

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Rana: Not everything in your book is horrific, but even some of the more light-hearted events like the carnival were shaped by that aftermath of the. War. So you have this very interesting section about ex Nazis, former Nazis singing carnival songs about how they weren't Nazis anymore. I wonder, when they were singing those songs that must have caused some uneasiness in society as a whole, were they really saying that they were sorry? Were they really repenting by singing these carnival songs? Or do you think in some ways it was an act of sort of ironic defiance? One wonders how sincere those songs actually were.听

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Harald: There are mixed feelings there. We can have traditional feelings about these carnival events immediately after the war. In general, there was much joy, much laughter, much dancing in these days because the close neighbourhood of death increased and heightened the intensity of life enormously. There are outbursts of joy because one had escaped the atrocity, one had survived, and one had a lot of reason to drink, dance and laugh. On the other hand, a lot of people were shocked by these outbursts of joy. They had the feeling of bad taste. Some Germans feel a genuine guilt, but only a few. The most of Germans stylised themselves as victims with the process of self-victimisation. And this made that they didn't need to think about the real victims, the Jews, the murdered civilians in Eastern Europe. And so it was easy for them to feel do you call it self pettiness? Much more than that, they felt guilt about what they have done.听

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Rana: Finally Harold, I found myself thinking about Ukraine. Ukraine is different because Ukraine is the victim. It's not the aggressor, but at the same time. It might become like Germany 1945, a post war society with rubble, with buildings destroyed, with refugees, huge numbers of them across the country. Do you think that the Ukraine of today in a few years, may have to go through the same sort of processes of aftermath and trauma and division? That post war Germany did as Ukraine seeks to emerge from its own rubble.听

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Harald: Uh, in some way, yes. But the huge difference for me is uh, that Germany has to turn themselves from a Nazi society to the Democratic society we now have and it was an enormous change of mentality, the Germans said, to get rid of the mentality which听had made the Nazi regime possible. Ukraine is far away from a civil Guild or something like that. Uh, it's a victim country, so, uh, I think it's really difficult to compare.听

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Rana: So let me turn to Alia Trabucco Zeran, author of When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold.鈥� Alia is an acclaimed novelist, but this book is non-fiction, although it reads very, very grippingly Alia, you get the story of four murders committed by women in Chile across the 20th century.鈥疊ut this is not blood and gore. This is not a sort of true crime story. In that sense, you're much more interested in the social effects that these murders had on society as a whole, and particularly in how it helps to understand changing attitudes towards women.鈥疭o could you tell us about one of the cases, a woman named Corina Rojas, an upper middle-class woman who in 1916 hired a man named Alberto Duarte to kill her husband, he was called David Diaz Munoz, to escape a loveless marriage in which she clearly felt like the victim of her husband, who was himself an extremely promiscuous man. Why did this case grab your attention?鈥�听

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Alia: 鈥疘n that particular case, and all of the four cases examined for me were equally attractive and equally fascinating because they coincide with particular moments of the history of feminism in Chile, so Corina was of a class that committed this murder through a third party. She hired someone to kill her husband at a historical time where the first feminist wave was starting to develop in Chile. And so when it was found that it was her who hired the murder, it was immediately associated to these rebellious act by other women, so their claims to, for example,听the right to vote would be associated to this other form of disobedience. So for me, the most fascinating aspect of these all these four crimes is not necessarily why these women committed these crimes, but what happens with society when they commit them.鈥�听

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Rana: 鈥疻ell, one of the most disturbing cases is one of the most transgressive you might almost say of norms, it comes from the 1960s 鈥� 1963- a nanny who kills her employer's children and also her mother, the employer鈥檚 mother I mean.听 This case is one that breaks an awful lot of norms, taboos, if you want to put it that way.鈥疧f course, as well as being deeply disturbing in its own right, what was it about the changing society that you would say that this case illustrates?鈥�听

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Alia: This was one of the hardest cases to analyse because of the of the level of transgression implied in the fact that she was killing children, right?鈥疶his was how she made a living so she had basically no other life outside of her employer鈥檚 house and she committed this series of murders in the 60s and while I was doing the research it was so impressive how she made the covers of every single newspaper and every single magazine for months. And yet then after the case happened in the 60s, it was forgotten. It was buried and it was very strange for me to see that silence that lasted for five decades until I wrote this book.鈥�听

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Rana: That's one of the things that actually occurred to me about the book which is how well known today in the 2020s these four cases are and they, I should say, they stretch between the 1910s to the 1960s - across essentially that that part of the 20th century.鈥疉re some of these cases more well known today than others, or were they all fairly obscure before you brought them back?鈥�听

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Alia: No, not at all. I would say the other three cases were better known, and actually the way I approached this topic for the first time, it was while I wanted to write about a literature written in prison, so I was actually trying to find books about that particular topic and all of a sudden I found this book.鈥疘t's called Carcel de Muheres,听 that is a women's prison, and it's written by Maria Catalina Geel who was a writer who killed her partner at the time at a very elegant hotel in the 1950s.听 And then she was in prison, and while in prison she wrote this book. So I was reading this book and I have to now confess that I have a training as a lawyer, so when I was reading her sort of fictional book written in prison, I was reading it and I thought there's something weird here. I'm pretty sure this book had some connexion with the trial because the book is constantly hiding facts about the murder. So my hypothesis was that this book she wrote during the trial trying to be published, but at the same time they don't affect the outcome of the trial.鈥� So I decided to try to find the judicial sentence, which was of course lost. And when I did and I actually was able to see that the book was used against her during the trial and so for me when, I when I found that incredible connexion between literature and law. I was well, I have to keep on researching on these cases. This is too fascinating.鈥�听

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Rana: In many ways. Your book is about the recovery of voices and Marit Kapla, your book is Voices from a Swedish village, which also is very much about hearing people who perhaps had remained hidden for a long time.鈥疶his village is a place where you yourself grew up, and it's undergone major shifts. It had to cope with the automation of its major industry over the 20th century.鈥疶hat is lumber. Could you tell us a bit about where this village is in Sweden and what it was like for you growing up there in the 1970s?鈥�听

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Marit:听 Yeah, so this village is in a county called V盲rmland, so it's not very far up north. It's on the same level as Stockholm.鈥疶hen it's close to the border of Norway. So I grew up in this village and I somehow got the sense that this is a place which everyone should move from. So without anyone telling me when I was a child, I kind of knew that we will all move. The educations were elsewhere.鈥�听

It's where the work that was elsewhere and we were learning about how lumbering was done in the old days.鈥疻e learned about that in school. We interviewed old men who had lumbered and in my village, I think maybe 80% at least of the men are working in the forests and now as someone says in the book all this work is done by machines, of course, so it's been a huge shift. And, uh, so I interviewed all the people living in all the grown-ups in Osebol land, the oldest ones who have lived in Osebol听for all their lives. The population has diminished by 2/3 and this creates a sense of loss.鈥�听

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Rana: Can I give an example from your book, Marit? I found it, you know, fascinating with these different voices. There's a man interviewed called Echuan Foot.鈥疊orn in 1943 and he came to the village in 1969 as he says, because he wanted to work with wood, but also because he says he wants to form part of a work collective.鈥疦ow, I may be almost stepping into cliche, but that seems to me very evocative of the Sweden of that era, the 60s and 70s, which is made very different from the Sweden of today.鈥�听

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Marit: Yeah, I've discovered that.鈥疢y book it came to be also about changes in time, which are, I think global in a way. You know, in the 60s and 70s in Sweden a lot of young people, enthusiasts, they were leaving the cities for the countryside. They could either be more political, like Eastman and his friends.鈥疶hey wanted to work in factories and share all the money. They were very idealistic and that was kind of part of the 60s and 70s.鈥疶hat lasted between 1970 and 1976, and then everyone else moved. But Echuan remained in Osebol, and he's an entrepreneur, so he actually fabricates playgrounds for water and exporting them all over the world.鈥�听

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Rana: Briefly Marit鈥�- One of your interviewees, Leonard Olson, says 鈥淚 feel sorry for any young person growing up here because of the shrinking of the community鈥�. Is there a future possible?鈥�听

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Marit: Yeah, that's the big question, isn't it and what I've discovered is also that this is happening all over the world, of course. I mean, urbanisation has been going on in the world for, I don't know, a hundred and fifty years at least and what I can see is that there are people moving into Osebol, so when I returned, because I live in Gothenburg since many years, but when I returned to the village to interview people and many of the villagers were new to me, so they had moved, moved to Osebol from other countries in Europe, some of them had vacation houses, but most of them from maybe from the Netherlands and from Hungary, they are living now a full time in Osebol, looking for another kind of life than the cities can provide. So I think if city life becomes too complicated and uncomfortable, then maybe more people will return. Yeah, but that's yeah. But I've, I've spoken to, you know, urban researchers, and they say that this is still very far off.鈥�听

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Rana: It might push people back towards the villagers again.鈥疞et me take a moment to bring everyone back in briefly, because I now have a very good idea of the ideas that have shaped your fascinating but very different books.鈥疊ut I just wanted to take a brief moment to find out an insight from each of you about how you wrote them, what the craft was, what the tactics were.鈥�听

Marit let me stay with you.鈥痀ou did long interviews with people aged between 18 and into their 90s for the book. How long did it take and was it easy to get people to talk?鈥�听

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Marit: Almost everyone agreed to be interviewed, and I interviewed everyone for maybe between one hour and 3 hours and some of them I am interviewed several times. It was so much fun making these interviews and I've learned so much about the society we all live in by making them.鈥�听

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Rana: Whereas Jing, you were looking back into a more distant year of the turbulent history of 20th century China for your research.鈥�听

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Jing: Yes, that's a part of it, as you can probably relate Rana it is the necessity of abandoning the distant critical academic and instead of making an argument, beating someone over the head.鈥�听

with it, but you actually have to embed the argument in the storytelling itself.鈥疉nd that was by far the most challenging. The rest basically draws on what we've been doing for decades, which is archives and more archives. And this project took me to several continents and about a dozen different countries.鈥疉nd there's also the part of actually the last two chapters, which deals in contemporary period, becoming an ethnographer in the process and learning how to interview people, how to be a flat table.鈥疭o it's been an extraordinary adventure in itself in many ways. I think it's only the end of book where I realised, wow, I'm one of the soldiers in this Chinese script revolution that I've been writing about, and it's still people who are very much committed to this project of cultural understanding through language most of all.鈥�听

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Rana: And Katie, how did you recreate the deaf and hearing worlds of a century ago?鈥�听

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Katie: Yeah, I mean, I'm trained as a writer. I believe in storytelling above all else, and so I really wanted to tell the story of these people as really multi-dimensional people. I wanted to understand my characters as human.鈥疘t's very hard to do that for a historical nonfiction book, so I end up spending a huge amount of time in the archives, reading over letters and diaries and looking at photos and just really understanding the minutiae of these days and feelings and the way their identities and ideas changed over time.鈥�听

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Rana: And Alia it seems that you actually brought yourself as a character into the book, searching for the details of what had happened to these women. When did you make that choice?鈥�听

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Alia: From the early days of the research, I would say in my case there was a very conventional way of doing things which was archival work and just like everyone else, just going into files and trying to find these very old material, which in Chile has a particularly difficulty because there was a recent dictatorship.鈥疭o going to the files to try to find old material was kind of dangerous and a bit suspicious for for some people, for the gatekeepers I would say of their archives.鈥�听

And there was an unconventional way of approaching this material. So I was not only interrogating what I was finding and bleeding, but also I kept a journal and of my work as a researcher of this kind of detection role that I was that I was doing and and and so that was the me as a character aspect.鈥疉nd there was a second, unconventional way of doing things, which implied using creative techniques such as writing fiction throughout a work of research.鈥疉nd I realised that bringing that creative aspect into a non-fiction work actually allowed me to understand the that when women kill, what happens with society question in A to a different angle.鈥�听

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Rana: And James, a comprehensive history of global science over the last few 100 years. No small task.鈥�听

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James: Absolutely to write it. I did many of the things that the other authors have described, but it also required connections as well, working with experts in Mexican history and Chinese history in West African history discussing these topics with them. So I don't think you can write just my names on the book, you can't write a global history on your own.鈥�听

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Rana: Well, I think all of these books show what happens when you transcend boundaries across cultures, and the results are certainly an eye opener. The finalist鈥檚 books are available now, and they are Katie Booth鈥檚, The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness; Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: A tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China; Alia Trabucco Zer谩n: When Women Kill 鈥� Four Crimes Retold; Harald J盲hner Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich; Marit Kapla听 Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village and James Poskett Horizons, a Global History of Science and the winner of that 拢25,000 prize will be announced at the British Academy on the 26th of October and prizes certainly go today to our producer Tim Bano and studio manager Andrew Garrett.鈥� Coming up soon, we'll be bringing you more discussions about language. I've been talking to the Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk, about the Ottoman Empire and what he really thinks about fellow Nobel laureate Albert Camus.鈥�听

And I'll be visiting an exhibition about Alexander the Great. Now there's a man who was definitely into understanding the globe, mostly by invading large parts of it. Worlds to conquer, soon on Free Thinking.鈥�听

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