Our host Vick Hope is joined by broadcaster Sian Eleri.
Sian is one of the biggest music tastemakers at BBC Radio 1 and shares her love for music across three shows at the station – Future Artists, Power Down Playlist and Chillest Show – as well as hosting a weekly show for Selector Radio, a global station celebrating British music. Named Music Week’s Rising Star in 2021, Sian has judged some of the UK’s biggest music prizes, including the AIM Independent Music Awards, the Youth Music Awards, the Welsh Music Prize, the BRITs and the prestigious Mercury Music Prize, which she presented to this year’s winner Sam Fender just a couple of weeks ago. She is also the host of The Voice Wales in her native Welsh language, which is returning soon for season two. Sian previously presented the BBC Three series Paranormal, Rolling Stone UK’s Future of Music, and is currently filming a documentary series about the Welsh artist, Gwen John, for BBC Cymru.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Sian’s five most influential books by women.
I was around 19 [when I first read this]. I did all my GCSEs through the medium of Welsh because it’s my first language […] and it blew me out of the water with the way it’s written. I think what’s magic about this book in particular is it completely changed my perspective of what Welsh writing was like. I felt like the way it was written was probably the most colloquial I’ve seen to this day from a writer in Welsh. It’s such an important book.
This book is an absolute dream, and not in a twisted weird way because it’s obviously about a horrendous serial killer, but it’s giving us the perspective of women who have encountered this man and survived through him, and this idea of how their interactions with this one person have ripples through the entire community. […] It’s an amazing book on women’s voices, and I had to bring it specifically for this podcast because it’s so masterfully done. It’s so emotionally complex. […] I wish I could read it from beginning to end as if I’d never read it before, because it’s one of those books you never want to end.
This is the one book I have not stopped Googling since finishing it! There’s so much about what is at the core of humanity when it comes to this book; that’s why I think it’s genius, because it’s made me completely rethink about what gives me meaning in my life. […] The writing speaks for itself – the second you dive in you’re already in the narrator’s world, you’re trying to figure it out just as much as she is and you’re going along with the journey of her self-discovery and who she is.
It says a lot about the current existence of the climate crisis. […] It’s an amazing reflection of how a huge problem that faces all of us can be individualised to this one woman’s experience, and how she feels so connected to it and how she feels an intense need to protect it and to feel comfort from these animals where the world is changing around them. There’s nothing they can do about it, and there are times when I feel really helpless about it. […] I think this is a lovely book in that you feel the level of empathy you feel she has for nature and the closeness that she feels, and that’s actually quite a normal thing. […] It’s such an adventure – it’s an odyssey. I love this book and I can’t wait to read it again.
It’s a depiction of womanhood! It’s all the messy things, it’s all the pretty things, it’s how we feel about ourselves all the way through from being teenagers and craving this idea of, ‘Oh I really want a special someone, I want my first kiss’, and that magic behind that of what romantic love looks like from what we’ve seen on telly and listened to in music, all the way through to what life is really like as a woman. […] So much of it speaks of womanhood and identity, and how much emphasis we put on romantic love to carve out meaning in our own lives, and navigating the rubbish things in life that are quite difficult if you’re single.
