Welcome to this bonus podcast of the Ted Hughes Society podcast, which has been recorded for the recently formed Ted Hughes Society Book Club.

Mark Wormald, the guest for this episode, is Chair of the Ted Hughes Society, a distinguished Hughes scholar and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he is also founder and curator of the Ted Hughes archive.

For this podcast, Mark will be talking about a favourite novel: ‘Never Let Me Go’ by the British novelist, Booker Prize Winner and Nobel Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro.

Kazuo Ishiguro - known to friends and colleagues as ‘Ish’ - was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain with his parents when he was five years old. He was educated at Woking County Grammar School in Surrey, Kent University, and the University of East Anglia where he studied for an MA in Creative Writing with Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury.

‘Never Let Me Go’ was Ishiguro’s 6th novel, and is set in a parallel England of the late-1990s in which many deadly diseases can be cured through organ transplants from cloned humans, At the centre of the novel is an emotional triad made up of the narrator Cathy and her two closest friends Ruth and Tommy, who are all destined to be first carers and then donors. The novel is both a dystopian bildungsroman and a moral fable in which the three friends gradually learn through childhood, as teenagers and young adults, about their predetermined, foreshortened lives, and the stories they tell themselves in their attempts to cope with what Joseph O’Neill, writing in The Atlantic, described as ‘their hesitant progression into knowledge of their plight - an extreme and heartbreaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place them’. And as the author Ramsey Campbell wrote ‘it’s a a story that's horrifying, precisely because the narrator [Cathy] doesn't think it is.’

If you wouldlike to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, or would like to join the society and the Ted Hughes Society Book Club, please go to: https://thetedhughessociety.org/

The opening and closing music is from Piano Quartet in A major, D667 'The Trout' by Franz Schubert, performed by George Solchany (piano), Arpad Gerecz (violn), Vilmos Palotal (cello), Thomas Lorand (viola), Jacques Cazauran (double bass). (This recording is in the public domain.)

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