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Johny Pitts explores the books of the 1920s with Alison McLeod, Bill Goldstein, James Clammer and Jo Hamya - asking why the era is so relevant today and how writers are responding to uncannily similar crises.

After the devastation of the First World War, a global flu pandemic, economic instability and civil unrest, many writers saw an opportunity to express their disillusionment with society’s issues such as women’s rights, class and racism. Often referred to as the Roaring Twenties. or the Jazz Age, it was also a time of sexual liberation and the pursuit of pleasure has often been perceived (often wrongly) as it’s dominating theme So with many parallels now, what will be the effect on fiction of the next decade? Will we see a period of creative expression and freedom to rival DH Lawrence, Woolf, Fitzgerald and Joyce – and what can reading of those novels reveal to us about what might happen next?

Presenter: Johny Pitts
Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Book List
Tenderness by Alison MacLeod
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein
Insignificance by James Clammer
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya
Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
The Rainbow by DH Lawrence
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Banjo by Claude McKay
Ulysses by James Joyce
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters