Jeanette Winterson joined us to celebrate the French edition of One Aladdin, Two Lamps, her book-length exploration of storytelling, built around One Thousand and One Nights. She recalls finding Shahrazad in her hometown library and the insight this led her to: that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact, and so rewrite her own story. The conversation moves from Freud, epigenetics and the plasticity of the brain to Manchester's Industrial Revolution and the lessons we failed to learn from it. Winterson traces AI from Ada Lovelace to Turing to today's tech moguls, making a case for cautious optimism and for calling it "alternative intelligence." She also argues for being present in the world, and looking at art without a phone.

Buy One Aladdin Two Lamps here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/one-aladdin-two-lamps-2

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Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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“Childhood is once again a resource to be extracted at any cost.”

Filmmaker-turned-legislator Beeban Kidron joined us to discuss Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. Kidron traces her path from directing documentaries to entering the House of Lords in 2012 (the same year smartphones became affordable enough for parents to hand to children) and how a strange, silent moment with four teenage girls in her kitchen launched a fourteen-year campaign. She unpacks the deliberate design choices behind addictive notifications and CSAM failures, and discusses why she focused her fight on children's rights as a strategic, less polarising lever. The conversation covers tech's grip on governments from Starmer to Trump, and considers how the industry's "free" business model is quietly reversing 150 years of social progress: from child labour laws to a generation working, unpaid, for the attention economy.

Buy Users: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/users-3

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BARONESS BEEBAN KIDRON is a global authority on digital regulation and accountability and is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment. She has played a determinative role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across the world. Baroness Kidron sits as a crossbench peer in the UK’s House of Lords, and is founder and former Chair of the 5Rights Foundation. She serves on the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and is a former member of the UN Broadband Committee. She is a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics, where she chairs the Digital Futures for Children research centre, and is an advisor to the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. Before she became a peer, Baroness Kidron was an award-winning film director. She co-founded the charity Filmclub (now Into Film) in 2006, and was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2012.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dave Eggers joins us to discuss his 14th novel, Contrapposto, a six-decade love story between childhood friends Cricket and Olympia, illustrated with his own drawings. Eggers traces the book's twenty-year gestation, the moment Olympia's character unlocked its structure, and why he gave Cricket his own boyhood fantasy of being "apprenticed" as a young artist. The conversation ranges widely: the decline of art-school access and the pier-side art collective he's launched in San Francisco; his literacy nonprofit 826 Valencia and its typewriter-obsessed students; and a candid, sometimes fiery take on AI's effect on writing, translation, and education, including an anecdote from his visit to OpenAI's offices.

Buy Contrapposto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/contrapposto-3

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Dave Eggers is the author of many books for adults and kids. He’s the founder of McSweeney's and the co-founder of 826 Valencia, and the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centers. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he was recently awarded the Newbery Medal for his all-ages book, The Eyes & the Impossible.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.