Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep19: Bookshelfie: Caroline Lucas MP

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Green MP Caroline Lucas and Vick Hope discuss feminism and Green Party principles and reveal which book from the list would benefit the Prime Minister. Caroline Lucas is the UK’s first Green MP,  first elected as Member of Parliament for Brighton Pavilion in 2010. She served as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2008 to 2012, and co-leader from 2016 to 2018.  She is a passionate campaigner involved in a wide range of organisations including animal charities, theatres, environmental networks, women’s groups and children’s charities to name a few. She’s also written a book, Honourable Friends, which details her first parliamentary term as a fresh, green voice to the House of Commons. Caroline’s book choices are: ** Fighting for Hope by Petra Kelly  ** Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver  ** Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth ** With the End in Mind by Kathryn Mannix ** Devotions: The selected Poems of Mary Oliver Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season five of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of Season Five? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit Harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. Do you think Rishi Sunak has read Donut Economics? I would be very surprised if Rishi Sunak had read it, but maybe that's my policy. Maybe I'll go and deliver him a copy.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vick Hope and I'm your host for Season 5 of the Women's Prize for Fiction. podcast. The podcasts that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. We have a phenomenal lineup of guests and I guarantee you'll be taken away plenty of reading recommendations. Today's guest is the UK's first green MP, Caroline Lucas. Caroline was first elected as Member of Parliament for Brighton Pavilion in 2010.

She served as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2008 to 2012 and co-leader from 2016 to 2018. She is unsurprisingly involved as a passionate campaigner across a wide range of subjects, which sees her working with animal charities, theatres, environmental networks, women's groups and children's organisations to name just a few. She's also written a book, Honourable Friends,

which details her first parliamentary term as a fresh green voice to the House of Commons. We are so delighted that you've made the time to speak to us about your favourite books. Welcome to the podcast, Caroline. Well, the excitement is all mine. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been such a lovely thing to be able to start thinking about. Do you get the time to read as much as you'd like? Not as much as I would like and not as much fiction as I would like.

I mean, there's just so much to be read in the areas that I work on, whether that's environmental climate or nature. So a lot of my reading is around some of those things. So making a space for fiction, making the space for poetry is always a bit of a battle. But I just love reading. It's always been part of my life. Yeah, books are just all around the house. You can't move without stumbling over them.

So it's really important. Join the club. Join the club, Caroline, stumbling over books. I actually am so glad that you mentioned poetry there because I've seen that you have brought a collection of poems for your bookshelfy. Is that something that you've always been into, something that you've always found, I guess, solace and joy in? I really have.

And I would put a lot of it to my friend at school, Rachel Nichols, who was such an amazing school friend. And when we were like 13 and 14, we were supposed to be doing music practice and she would always spirit up books to the music practice rooms and we would sort of creep along the corridors and sit together.

And I'm afraid I'm still rubbish at the violin, but I do know a lot more poetry than I would have done if I hadn't had that experience. And she came from a fantastically literary family. And so reading Emily Dickinson, for example, for the first time, I just still remember just the amazing, just the excitement of reading Emily Dickinson or one of my favorites, Emily Bronte, I love, Thomas Hardy.

Yeah, as a teenager, they were absolutely my go-to places for solace and comfort and joy, really. Were you from a literary family? Not at all. There was hardly a book in our home. I think is why I've kind of the other extreme. I remember going to the second-term bookshop at Hayle and W for the first time. And I came away more or less with a kind of wheelbarrow full of books because I was just so gobsmank. by seeing so many books in one place at one time. So no, it didn't come from home, but it certainly came from friends.

Oh, what a magical feeling, though. If you weren't necessarily surrounded by books, then being in a place where you were. It's honestly transcendental. Like, it's an incredible sensation. You also, of course, put pen to paper yourself. You've written your own book. Tell me about that. How was it for you?

Well, I just felt that it was such an extraordinary privilege to be the first green in Parliament that I kind of wanted to document what it felt. like. And I was just looking back at the book just last night. And so it was written and published in 2015, so a little way ago now. But that sense of turning up at this extraordinary parliament that just didn't seem to make any sense at all in terms of how it worked or how it didn't work and it doesn't work. And understanding actually that it's almost in the interests of the party whips, the other party whips, to keep MPs in a degree of darkness about what's going on because that way they can be manipulated more easily.

So I just wanted to kind of capture what it felt like, some of the battles trying to get green ideas accepted, and just record that for history. So it's very much a kind of a book that was written, you know, on Train Journey's back to Brighton, on bits of paper, on emails, and then sort of pool together. So it's not the most polished work,

but I hope it does give the sense of kind of what it felt like to be at the Colface for the first time on your own and not having any kind of tradition of having Green Party MPs in Parliament. So there's no one to tell you what to do. And just trying to work it out for yourself and just the strength of my fantastic team around me too, which kind of made it all possible. Well, we're going to talk about the books that have shaped you

that have no doubt contributed to that project as well, to those moments that you were sitting on train scribbling notes down and that working alongside you doing your day-to-day job. And your first book, Shelf, book is Fighting for Hope by Petra Kelly. Petri Kelly was one of the co-founders of the German Green Party and in this book written in 1984, she presents her political ideas and suggestions for women working in politics to work compassionately with love, peace and civility. Tell us about how this book influenced you. Well, it's a source of such sorrow to me that many people

probably won't have heard of Petra Kelly because she really was such a a star of green politics. And for me, starting off in green politics in the late 80s, knowing that Petro Kelly was there, seeing the fantastic work she did, just her extraordinary intellect, her energy and honesty and vision, her uncompromisingness,

and just the way she kind of stood for life. I have a precious photograph of her entering the Bundestag, the German parliament for the first time. wearing jeans, she's carrying armfuls of sunflowers, and she just kind of symbolizes life among all of these kind of grey suits. And it was at the time, those early

80s when she wrote the book, where the threat of nuclear war seemed very present, very real. There were lots of films about it at the time. Lots of people talking about it then, just as people talk about climate change now. And so that sense of being

on the side of life being kind of linked to things like Greenham common. It just felt truly inspirational. And I loved the way she talked about the Green Party. And I wondered if I could just read out a sentence because it kind of sums up for me what the Green Party is about. And I put it at the preface of my own book. She called the Green Party the anti-party party. In other words, a party that's not part of the system. And she said this, we can no longer rely on the established parties nor can we go on working through extra parliamentary channels

there's a need for a new force both in Parliament and outside it and while an element of this new force is represented by the anti-party party party the Greens it's become increasingly important to vote for what one believes to be right on the basis of content rather than wasting one's vote on lesser evils I just think that's perfect and it's as true now as it ever was she was a huge inspiration to me and her book, this fighting for hope,

you know, we talk about the personal being political, but for Petra Kelly, I think that was, you know, that was something that she absolutely took to heart and the book is a very, very personal manifesto of her involvement in politics, what mattered to her, everything from economics through to nuclear, through to pesticides, through to love, actually. So, yeah, I think it's a really important book.

How did you become politicised? I mean, did you grow up in a politicised? political or liberal family household. Would your childhood friends be surprised at where you are now? I think probably they would. So no, it wasn't a political family at all. And to the extent it was political, it was more right-wing. I mean, it was a daily mail-reading household.

Okay. It was through the friends that I met, and I come back to this friend, Rachel Nichols, who really was transformative for me and just over my eyes to so much. And so I think I became politicalizing. when I was at university, it was a sort of time of the Falklands War and Thatcher and all of the horrendous things that happened at that time. But actually, the thing that got me to join the Green Party, the kind of light, bold moment, was another book, interestingly.

It was a book by Jonathan Porritt called Seeing Green that he wrote in 86, I think. No, 84, and I read it in 86, that's right. Seeing Green basically was a book about all of the different kind of symptoms of what's going wrong, whether that's environmental degradation or nuclear weapons or the patriarchy and the discrimination against women and against different groups. And what he did in that book was to bring them all together, all of those issues, and demonstrate how there is a political solution that goes to the causes of all of that. And so that book I read, I happened to be in London at the time doing research,

on the PhD I was writing. And I read the book and I was in a really miserable bed-sitting Clapham. And I turned the book over and saw that the Green Party was based in the Clapham High Road, which kind of seemed like a sign to me that I was meant to go and join up straight away. So I marched up and down the Clapham High Road, looking for what I fondly imagined would be the huge offices with a big brass plaque saying Green Park. I found this tiny little room behind a laundry, which was the Green Party office. So I signed up there and then.

I can only imagine. You mentioned that image of Petra Kelly with her sunflowers amongst this sea of grey suits. I'm sure this is a question that you're asked all the time, but how difficult is it to be a woman in politics, which is, of course, a traditionally male world. And for me, that conjures an image of a sea of grey suits. I mean, I have to say that it's an awful lot easier now than it was when, you know, some of the real pioneers were going into Parliament for the first time.

When you hear, for example, someone like Harriet Harmon talking about her experience in Parliament, you realize that we've come an awful long way. So I think in Westminster now, we're about 35% of MPs are women. So we're still a long way off 50-50, but I think it's probably the highest percentage that there's been so far. But it is harder. I mean, I came from the European Parliament. I had 10 years in the European Parliament where it was pretty much 50-50 and where your gender was never even a thing you ever thought about

because there was just such a mix and a diversity of people. And so coming from that very diverse European Parliament to Westminster was quite a shock and it did seem extraordinarily white and extraordinarily male and that so many things were just done because that was the way they'd already always been done. Even something as simple as, you know, I was writing a private members bill, and I wanted to put in it at least the two pronouns, he or she, if not three, and everything had to be in the pronoun he.

And I just had this real battle with the clerk saying, this makes no sense we're in the 21st century, come on. And so it just felt like there's battle after battle. And so if you're not careful, you get so diverted by process battles, that your eye loses the ball of the main thing you're trying to change. And there is still some way to go, but we're getting there. We'll move on now to your second bookshelfy book, Caroline, which is Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver.

Written by Women's Prize-winning author, Barbara Kingselver, Flight Behaviour follows the story of a young mother who comes across a hillside on her family farm covered in monarch butterflies, which haven't yet migrated south. Is this a miraculous message from God, or a spectacular sign of climate change. She and an entomology expert, Ovid Byron, set out Discover the Truth. What did you love about this book, Caroline?

Well, I just love the way that Barbara Kingsolver writes anyway, and it was a bit of a battle for me to decide whether to put this book on my... There's always a battle. Or to put the Poisonwood Bible, which is an early book from her, which I also absolutely love. It's a book about a family. in the Belgian Congo. But this book I chose,

because I just think she does something that's incredibly difficult, and I think she does it incredibly well. And that is to have a book kind of with a message. I mean, it is a book about climate change and how we communicate about climate change, but it's also a fantastically compelling,

funny story about this young woman growing up in the Appalachians and living with her infuriating husband and trying to understand the science of climate change when this entomologist comes to her remote village because these monarch butterflies have been kind of pushed off course by climate change and they've ended up basically in her backyard. And it's just written with such precision and beauty.

Can I quote another little bit? It's the very opening words. I'm a huge fan of quotes being sprinkled in, so yes, yes, please. Well, the opening lines of flight behavior are these. a certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away and it is one part rapture or so it seemed for now to a woman with flame-coloured hair

who marched uphill to meet her demise innocence was no part of this she knew her own recklessness and marvelled really at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace wow. I mean, wow. It has an opening paragraphing you. It was just extraordinary. And that issue about how to communicate about climate change is something that I literally lie awake worrying about and thinking about. And I think she just does a fantastic job with this book because I think it will reach people for whom, you know, the climate emergency is not something that's necessarily on the top of their agenda and they might not be thinking about it much at all. And yet it's not a, it's not a depressing book at all. It's a marvellously uplifting and funny book, but it gets to the

heart of some of the debates about why is it, and the wonderful words of Pete Posselthwaite from a film called The Age of Stupid, why is it, knowing what we know now, we didn't act when we still had time. And frankly, to me, that is the most important question. That is what gets me up in the morning is just thinking, we are heading right now for climate catastrophe. We know it. We don't lack the science. We don't lack the technology. We don't lack the technology. We don't let the finance. What we lack is the political will and what is it that's going to mobilize our political leaders to take action before we've actually gone over the edge. And I think those big questions are tackled in this book in the lightest, most elegant way.

Through its lightness, through its elegance, through its wit, humour and beauty, part of flight behaviour's success is how accessible it makes the subject of. climate change. And like you've just said, a big question. How do you make climate change accessible to the wider population? Well, I think there's an object lesson kind of unrolling right now, in a sense, with this cost of living crisis, cost of living scandal, I prefer to call it, in the sense that the government has been exacerbating it rather than alleviating it. But to the extent that so many of the policies that we need to address the climate crisis are also policies that are going to make life better, in other words, why don't we insulate? everyone's homes so that they're not shivering in the 21st century,

dying of fuel poverty in the 21st century. Why hasn't that been at the centre of the government's approach to the climate crisis, to the gas prices, to high energy prices? You know, that would be the most effective, quickest way of getting people's fuel bills down and getting climate emissions down. So I think part of this is about how do you identify those areas which are going to make people's lives better as well as addressing the climate crisis

rather than framing the whole climate debate as some kind of debate about what we have to give up. It is all about shivering around a candle in a cave with hair shirts. You know, this is not what it's about, and it's not a compelling vision when people talk about it that way. This is fundamentally about how do we live better on this precious planet that we have. And addressing the climate crisis

really gives us a once in an event. in a lifetime opportunity to address that wider question about how we live well on a finite planet. I always say the climate crisis is a human rights crisis as a human rights activist. It's so intertwined because those who will be affected disproportionately are those from backgrounds who have less. It is not fair. And getting that message across, I think is so important. I'd like to ask actually, are feminism and the principles of the Green Party intertwined, do you feel? Absolutely. And actually going back to Petra Kelly, that was one of the things that attracted me to her most of all. She's extremely explicit about feminism, about how we need to

challenge the kind of patriarchal mindset. And that goes from everything through from discrimination against women through to through to an attitude of power, whether that's power. Whether that's over women or power over nature. And she really draws out those parallels incredibly clearly in that book, Fighting for Hope. And to me, feminism and equality and social justice and racial justice are absolutely intrinsic

to green politics. Yes. In the past, you've been arrested at an anti-fracking process, which you must be pleased seems to be off the government's policy menu for now. But what do you think of the new right- to protest laws? I am terrified by the new clampdown on stopping people from being able to protest.

And I don't think we should be under any illusion about how serious they are. It's part of a whole suite of policies that the government is bringing in, whether that's making it more difficult for people to vote through the requirements now to have more ID before you can go and vote. The crackdown, as you say on protest, the crackdown on judicial review. It feels as if our freedoms are being taken away on a daily basis. And I don't think that as a whole we've kind of woken up to that yet. I think there's kind of a sense that we don't do things like that in Britain,

or we've won our freedoms and therefore they won't be taken away again. The idea that you have to battle for democracy on a daily basis is something I think that we haven't fully understood yet. And we need to understand it really fast because the right to peaceful protest has been, been at the heart of so many of the democratic wins that we've had, whether that's been about the suffragettes or whether it's been what happened in the anti-apartheid movements or anti-slavery. I mean, the right to peaceful protest is an intrinsic part of our democracy. It's an intrinsic part of green politics, too, and that arrest in Bolcombe around fracking. You know, I feel it was entirely legitimate.

I should add, as well, I was taken to court and acquitted, which is an important part of the story. but people being willing to put their bodies where their beliefs are, I think is massively important and we should be defending that right. Bayleys is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Look in for a treat to pair with your favourite book.

Baileys is the perfect accompaniment to enjoy either over ice or over coffee. Your third book, Shelfy book, is Donor Economics by Kate Rayworth. Shrewd, radical and rigorously argued. Oxford Academic Kate Rayworth's book takes us through seven critical ways in which modern economics has led us astray. And in the process, she creates a new cutting-edge economic model that is fit for the 21st century.

When did you first read this book? Why have you picked it? I picked it because I suppose it goes back to my obsession about how do we communicate about climate, about economics in a way that's more meaningful perhaps than we have to date. And the kind of epigram in Kate's book, she says, the most powerful tool in economics is not money, not even algebra, it's a pencil. Because with a pencil, you can redraw the world. And I think what she's getting at there is that for as long as we think of the economy as a kind of a linear thing where you dig resources out of the

Earth on one side of the planet, you transport them to another bit of the planet, you use them, you chuck them away, and then they get taken away and another hole is dug in another bit of the planet to bury them in. As long as that's our view of linear economics, and as long as we are obsessed with thinking that that process has to speed up and speed up because we need more and more economic growth, then if that's how we see things, then we really are on a highway to hell to quote the UN Secretary General. And what donut economics is about, it's a funny title, but essentially it's about drawing a different picture of the economy,

having a circular economy in your head. And basically the donut is kind of like two concentric rings. And the idea is that the inner ring, the idea is to make sure people don't fall below that. In other words, we need a basic amount of food and protection and shelter and literacy and all of those kind of social foundations that we need. But the outer ring of the donut kind of relates to the critical ecological ceiling. In other words, there's a planetary boundary, whether it comes to climate change or biodiversity or

anything else, which we mustn't exceed. And so living between those two rings of the donut is where we can live and thrive all of us together, north and south. So it's just about what I like about it is it's about a different way of seeing the world. It's about telling different stories about the world. And it does seem to me that that is going to be so vital in the shift that we need to make, that you know, you can write as many very very worthy textbooks as you like or leaflets or whatever. But unless we tell stories, unless we have different images in our mind,

then I don't think we're going to be able to shift quick enough to a different way of being in the world. This book makes so clear why infinite. Grove on a finite planet is neither possible nor desirable. If you could implement just one idea from this book, I'm sure there are many in the UK tomorrow. What would it be? Well, actually, I think what I would do is to get economics taught differently at school and at universities because that is the thing that would be transformative, that yes, we could introduce one policy, but then you might have a different government come in and they might overturn that policy and so forth.

Whereas if we could actually think differently about the economy from the very start, then I think we might have the chance of a more sustainable change. So I would love to see donor economics taught at every economics course, you know, in colleges and universities so that people can understand that in the 21st century, we need a different economic model, not the one that we've been using for several centuries,

which has now been patently shown, to be hugely destructive to the environment and not even delivering in its own terms for people, north and south. We know that there are still billions of people living in massive poverty. And yet somehow we think that just accelerating the same model is going to solve the problem. Well, there's that famous saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity. And it's clearly not working. So I think if we could teach economics differently, then we might just have a better chance of people understanding that we need that circular economy.

We can't just think that we need to grow our way out of difficulty. We need to, in the words of Kate Rayworth, we need to have an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows, rather than the current obsession with more and more growth, whether or not it makes us thrive. It almost feels like there's such an obsession with GDP growth, the growth of gross domestic product. We never actually think about why we're doing it, and are people benefiting from it? And we've got to a point now where that very model of growth

is destroying the planet and undermining the lives and livelihoods of people right around the world. Do you think Rishi Sunak has read Donut economics? I would be very surprised if Rishi Sunaq had read it, but maybe that's my policy. Maybe I'll go and deliver him a copy. A gift for you, Rishi. What do you think is the role of the Green Party

in the next 10 years of UK policy? Oh, well, God, I mean, we just, we need to be the government. I mean, we really do. We're not messing about here. When I was the first elected in 2010, I must admit, I thought that there would be more green MPs by now, even though we have such a horrible electoral system that makes it so difficult for smaller parties.

You know, there are greens in not just parliaments, but in governments, in the rest of Europe, around the world. And the reason that it's not happened here in the UK is essentially down to this first-past-the-post voting system that makes it so hard, the smaller parties. But if we're serious about our analysis, about the urgency of addressing climate and nature crises, then absolutely. Greens need to be in power. So I'm not quite sure how it's going to happen. We're going to keep banging away. We're getting lots of local

successes at local council level. Obviously, we're hopeful of getting more Greens elected in the next general election. And simply by being in the room, we can shift the policies of the other parties. They know that when there are greens in the room, they have to up their game on green policies. So that's useful, but it's not enough. We absolutely need to get more greens and positions of power. If we were to see a Labour government, perhaps at the next general election, do you see a more natural environmental partner in them over the Conservatives? I think it would be very hard to imagine the party that could be worse right now for the environment, the conservatives. You know, they are going ahead with new coal mines.

They are going ahead with licensing 100 new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea. I mean, this is just madness. So yes, certainly I think the Labour Party would be better than that. I think my challenge to Labour would be to look at their economic policies as well as their environment policies because going back to the debate about donor economics, I'm not. sure that Labor signs up to the kind of economics that Kate Rayworth's talking about. Unless we have that kind of economics, though, you can have as many green policies as you like bolted on to business as usual, but it's not going to work if you're so obsessed by more

and more economic growth that actually any environmental benefit you gain is then undermined and outweighed by a very damaging model of growth. So perhaps we need to be pressing donor economics into the hands of Kirstama as well, as Rishi Zienek. I think we do. I think we do. Your fourth book, Caroline, is with the end in mind by Catherine Manix. In this touching, wise and funny book, palliative medicine pioneer Dr. Catherine Manix explores the biggest taboo in our society, death. Using nearly four decades of clinical practice, her book answers the most intimate and searching questions about the process of dying. Tell us why you chose this.

Well, this is a bit of a change of gear. Yes. And yeah, I just think that as a society, we're not very clever when it comes to dealing with death. And I'm really fascinated by this. And I think Catherine Manix has such compassion and wisdom when she talks about it. She is someone who's spent 40 years working in cancer management and palliative care. And she's on a mission, really, to reclaim lost wisdom about dying. You know, she will say that death isn't a medical,

event by and large, obviously sometimes it is, but it's not a medical event. It's much more often a social and deeply personal event. And in previous centuries, it wasn't hidden behind institutional walls. You know, before this century, there would scarcely have been anyone who hadn't seen friends or family die, but today we can hardly even bear to say the D word. You know, we have a whole set of different euphemisms to use. And so to me, this book is so important on a very kind of personal level in a way because I think if one considers how we want to die well, then that also raises big questions about how to live well as well. And having those thoughts now, when there's still time to potentially change the way we do things, rather than having those thoughts on our own

deathbeds, feels quite important. So this book is about the stories of the patients that she's worked with, how they've faced death, how she's helped to make it much less scary. And they are sometimes heart-wrenching, but they're also sometimes funny and compassionate. And they just get to the heart, really, of how we can accompany one another at that point of death. That feels to me massively important. It's such a compassionate book tackling those taboos that we've just mentioned. And also making the case that it's a conversation we should or have. It's also about living well, you know, because that's so fundamental to dying well.

Many people come to Catherine's work when they're experiencing or about to experience grief. Did this book help you in some way? Yes. My mother died last year and my dad died a couple of years before that. And yes, definitely it helped me to, well, to have conversations actually before my mother died, which felt important. You know, so often, so often people have regrets because they didn't have conversations

because they didn't quite know how to have those conversations with someone who's dying. You know, it's almost as if we're scared of acknowledging that a loved one is dying because we somehow think that if we acknowledge it, it'll suddenly come as news to them, whereas quite often they are well aware of the fact that they're dying. And actually, it would be probably quite a relief

to be able to talk about it rather than having to put on a brave face. So learning how to... to have those conversations, having the confidence to have those conversations, I think is so important. And I think Catherine just is such a brilliant teacher when it comes to that. I'm really sorry for your loss last year, Caroline. Thank you. What did you take from the book then? What do you think needs to perhaps change about the

way that Western society handles the end of life? Well, I just think we need to start talking about it would be a start. and to stop thinking about it as such an entirely medical, medicalized event, bringing death back into the community when that's appropriate. And of course I understand there'll be times when that's absolutely not possible or appropriate. But so many people coming towards the end of their lives would choose if they could to die at home. And yet that's quite hard. So actually, one of the things I took from this was to sign up to an organisation called Living Well, Dying Well.

it's based in Lewis just outside Brighton. And they train people to become what they call death dolers, people who are prepared to walk alongside people who are dying and the families of those who are dying and to be a kind of witness and a support, a practical help, hopefully an emotional help of some sort too. And it feels to me that bringing the whole dying process to the extent possible back into the community

and being with one another through that process is something that we both make the dying process less painful and less scary, but also has the potential to open our eyes to a whole way of really appreciating the preciousness of life while we have it. It's so easy, isn't it, to go through life kind of running from one crisis to the next

without realizing that we're here for a very short time and making the most of this precious life is something that is something that's good to remember. I think it's a mantra to live by. We move on now to your fifth and final book, which is devotions, collected poems by Mary Oliver. Philitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. I love that we're finishing on this note.

I love how uplifting it can be to read Mary Oliver's poetry. Why did you pick it? For those very reasons, I mean, I just think they are so uplifting. And it does relate back to the conversation we were just having really about life and recognising how precious it is. And for me, Mary Oliver is just a reminder to kind of slow down a bit. You know, sometimes she just talks about the importance of just paying attention. and I find that very helpful because I am prone to dashing from one thing to the next thing and not paying attention.

And I've now got much more involved in the kind of mindfulness movement too, which personally I find helpful just to have more of a grounding. But for me, these poems are kind of mindfulness in action, mindfulness in literature, if you like. I don't know if I'm pushing my luck to see if I could actually read one of them. Have we got time for that? Yes. I love that we're having a poem read. Yes. I don't think we've had that yet on the podcast. So I'm very happy. I love Mary Oliver so much. Okay. Well, that's great. And in a sense, if I read the poem, then I don't really need to explain why I love it. Hopefully it'll just be obvious. Yeah. I think that's the thing about her is that it's so, it's this very potent drop of serotonin just via the most perfect word economy. Everything makes perfect sense. And it's so vivid. so I feel like it will speak for itself. You put that so beautifully. I love that, the drop of serotonin.

It's perfect. Exactly what it is. And they're incredibly accessible. But as you say, I just think they make, well, they make me anyway just kind of stop in my tracks. So this is the summer day. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean, the one who's flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who's moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who's gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away.

Mary Oliver is loved by readers for this beautifully raw observation of the natural world. So often it's about the natural world. Is this a reason that you're drawn to her poetry? I think so. absolutely as you say there's that detail you know that bit about the grasshopper she doesn't just say any grasshopper it's this particular one on her hand moving its jaws in a kind of strange way that way of really um noticing paying attention to to the nature all around us whether that's animals or plants or anything else i find really very special very beautiful i love um having

a poetry brook in my bag at all times because i feel like more so than a novel, you get this short, sharp dose of beauty that you can find even in the darkest places. And I feel like that level of description, it helps you to see even in the most mundane, everyday scene. Just a little hint of light, which is exactly what you've just done with that poem. Are there any of your fellow politicians that you feel could benefit from reading a little bit of Mary Oliver? Well, to be fair, I think all of us could just because I think she's just so nourishing for our soul. It is soul food and who doesn't need a bit of that. But I just want to say, I really agree with what you just said about having a bit of poetry in your bag.

And I love the poems on the tube when they did that. Yeah, me too. The tube and you're just really not feeling in the mood. for poetry at all, but then suddenly your eye kind of catches it. And it transforms the moment that you're standing there. It's wonderful. It transforms the moment that you're standing there because you're not seeking it out. It's such a lovely surprise. Every time you sit on the tube and let's face it, often you're on the tube, you've got an armpit in your face. It stinks. You're hot, you're sweaty. I'm usually lugging loads of bags around. I'm uncomfortable. And as soon as I catch just a glimmer

of one of those poems, you turn to look at it and it changes the moment entirely. I could not agree more. Caroline, the UK is facing a challenging time for lots of people right now. The cost of living, the NHS strikes. What can we feel optimistic about? What gives you hope in challenging times? I think what gives me hope are our fellow human beings who are doing so much against the odds to fight for this better world.

I mean, it's all around us, isn't it? Those lovely words from Arandati Roy about another world is not only possible, but she's on her way and on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. I love that. And, you know, I don't want to keep talking about young people because I feel sometimes, you know,

older generations like myself put such a pressure on young people by saying, oh, they're amazing and they're, you know, they're going to save the world for us. You know, they have a right to just have a good youth without having to worry about saving the world. But there are so many young people, particularly young people from the global South,

who are just doing so much now to wake up politicians and political leaders and each other and mobilising and just not taking no for an answer. So that does give me hope, although I'm sorry that, you know, in the words of Greta Thunberg, they should be at school and so forth,

not having to worry about saving the planet. They should be at school reading Donate Economics. Yes. My final question to you today, Caroline, is if you had to choose one book from your list, as a favourite, which one would it be and why? Oh, I don't know you're going to do that. I should have thought of that. Sorry. I'm sorry, sorry. I suppose for the reasons we've just been discussing, it would have to be Mary Oliver. There's just everything in there in a way. I don't think you would ever get tired of rereading it.

If I've just got one book, I'm going to be rereading it an awful lot. and I think the Mary Oliver does just bear that rereading and each time you read it you see something slightly different in it so I would be delighted to have that one. Absolutely beautiful. Caroline, thank you so, so much for your time, for your wisdom, for your words and for sharing with us and here's to a brighter, greener future.

Thank you, it's been a lot of fun. Really appreciate it. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction. podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.