Our host Vick Hope is joined by wildlife and science broadcaster Kate Humble.
As well as starring in over 70 television programmes, Kate is the author of seven books, including A Year of Living Simply, Home Cooked, Where the Hearth Is and Thinking on My Feet, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize. Kate’s latest book, Home Made: Recipes from the Countryside is a collection of over 60 simple, sustainable recipes from her very own kitchen table, alongside inspiring stories from 20 individuals who play a role in bringing food to us.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to see Kate’s top five most influential books written by women.
Cassandra is a very relatable character even though very few of us grew up in crumbling castles – Dodie Smith just draws out her emotions, her responses to the world, so beautifully and so relatably. I remember reading that book and thinking I want to be her or I want to be on that journey she’s on… [Dodie Smith] absolutely tapped into the teenage minds of young girls growing up as I did – and just created a world that was full of possibility, but not a sugarcoated one.
[Mary Kingsley] went in her tweed skirt with buttons up the side and her little heeled Victorian boots and she climbed Mount Cameroon in that outfit with her little hat on. And to me, she celebrates everything that can be amazing about being a female – that is “You know what, I’m just gonna do it and I don’t care what anyone else thinks” – and it takes tremendous chutzpah, but she has that in spades.
She writes about a woman. The race of that woman, the colour of that woman’s skin, the birthplace of that woman are all absolutely intrinsic to her character, but it’s not excluding. It doesn’t cut you out if you’re not that. And I think that’s what’s so brilliant about her writing, is that she makes it universal – even though I will never experience life in the way that her life is portrayed, I still empathise, understand, feel it, appreciate it.
We live in a world at the moment, where a lot of things through social media, nuance is gone. And nuance is a wonderful thing. It gives a richfulness and a complexity and a thoughtfulness to a story or a situation – this is a book that is absolutely full of nuance… Even though there is evil intent running through this book, as a reader of the story you never feel hate – you feel empathy, you feel sympathy, you feel sorrow and you feel extraordinary joy. And that’s what’s amazing about the way that this story is told.
It’s about how humanity responds to chaos and to the uncontrollable – how do you bring back some semblance of order when all around you has been disrupted in a way that you have no blueprint for? And what’s extraordinary about this is that it should be, or could be, a very dark story with no light at the end of the tunnel… but what I remember most acutely about it is that final moment of pure, bright, sharp hope in a very dark world.
