Dr Alison Garden Works with BBC NI to Create Four Programmes About Novels of Forbidden Love
Dr. Alison Garden, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the School of Arts English and Languages, has worked with BBC NI to put together a series of short programmes on four novels exploring the dangerous thrill of illicit love during the NI Troubles.
Produced as part of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped Our World' project and based on the research conducted for her second monograph, Alison worked with BBC NI's Jason Martin to develop four programmes about four very different novels.
The books include Joan Lingard’s iconic young adult novel, Across the Barricades (1972); Jennifer Johnston’s novel about a child’s loss of innocence in Derry, Shadows on Our Skin (1977); and the late Eugene McCabe’s historical novel, Death and Nightingales (1992), which was turned into a TV series for the BBC in 2018 staring Jamie Dornan, Ann Skelly and Matthew Rhys. The final novel in the series is Glenn Patterson’s The International (1999); Glenn Patterson is currently Professor of Creative Writing and Head of the Seamus Heaney Centre here at Queen’s University Belfast.
The audio of each programme is accompanied by archival footage. Across the Barricades (1972), Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Glenn Patterson’s The International (1999) take footage from the BBC archives. The images for the programme on Eugene McCabe’s novel, Death and Nightingales (1992), are taken from the archival holdings of the National Library of Ireland and the British Library'.
This was part of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped Our World’ project and you can view these here: https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/loveacrossthedivide/.'