Landscapes of Silence

Broadcast 12 April, 2023. Duration: 54 minutes

______________________________________________________________________

Renowned anthropologist, film-maker and author, Hugh Brody is joined by writer, novelist and former president of English PEN, Lisa Appignanesi OBE to discuss his latest publication, Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic. Author Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic.

Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother’s home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape – but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences.

He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land – and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism.

In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity – as well as hope.

________________________________________________________________________

Speakers:

Hugh Brody is an author, filmmaker and anthropologist who has lived in Vancouver, London and the Suffolk coast. He attended Trinity College at Oxford for both undergraduate and graduate degrees and has held teaching positions at several universities in Ireland, Canada and England, including 14 years as a Senior Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies. He is also a recipient of several Honorary positions: Associate, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge; Honorary Professor Of Anthropology, University of Kent, Canterbury.

Lisa Appignanesi OBE is the author of many books, including Everyday Madness, Mad, Bad, and Sad, and Freud’s Women (with John Forrester), a spring board for the Women and Freud Exhibition. A former Chair of the Freud Museum and the Royal Society of Literature, she was President of English PEN and is on the Executive Board of the Freud Museum Vienna.