Our host Vick Hope is joined by Thangam Debbonaire.
Thangam is a Labour Member of the House of Lords, where her key interests include arts policy, international cultural partnerships and diplomacy, copyright and AI. A former Labour MP, she served as Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport from September 2023 until May 2024. Before parliament, Thangam worked for 25 years on the protection from – and prevention of – violence against women and girls, both nationally and internationally. She was recently announced as chair of the judging panel for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, sponsored by Findmypast.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Thangam’s five most influential books by women.
It reminds me of a particular time – the first excitement of falling in love, and how that works out and it’s just beautifully done. It takes me back but it’s also incredibly comforting as a story; it takes a lovely course through Linda Raslett’s life and I’ve come back to it many many times. I’ve met other people who also love it – there’s a feature in the book called ‘Hons Cupboard’ which is a place that the sisters go and hide when they want to talk without being heard by the grown ups […] and a couple of friends of mine and I have a code which goes ‘hons cupboard’ and that means, ‘let’s meet quickly’!
I knew Willa Cather existed and was vaguely aware that she was an archetypal American frontier writer, but not much more about her. And I was in Barnes and Noble in Minnesota and I saw it, and I thought I’d read it on the way home. I was going through a particularly tricky time, all sorts of things were a bit tricky for me at that point, and I read it solidly in one go on the way home. It was a good reminder of what the best of fiction in particular can do.
I read this last year, when I lost my parliamentary seat in the election. […] I had the opportunity, shall we say, to think quite a lot about how much democracy meant to me, but around the time when I lost I said, ‘I believe in democracy and I love democracy. You can’t just love it when you win, you have to also love it when you lose’, which was actually a great comfort, it wasn’t just something I was saying. […] It covers such breadth. I then went on to judge a political prize, the Orwell Prize, and this is a good example of why it’s important to make sure that you are commissioning work from women – it’s why the Women’s Prize needs to exist.
It’s absolutely spellbinding, but spellbindingly beautiful as well as horrifying, moving, upsetting, funny in places. Again, the relationships between women are really important. And the fact that there isn’t a comma in the title, it is ‘Looking at Women Looking at War’, so she is looking and she is writing, but she’s also in it. […] It’s also a beautiful example of originality of form because the way it’s been done, partly because she’d edited some, and some of it not. The editing panel who knew her writing very very well had to make a series of decisions about what they put in, how they did it, and how they marked parts Amelina hadn’t finished editing, which actually adds to the poignancy and adds to the work of art.
Female friendship, and this is going to sound like a cliché, but it’s incredibly important and it’s sustaining. […] Elena and Lila’s friendship is very beautifully told, and has universal themes of love and passion, misunderstanding and feelings of betrayal, and then recognition of how much you mean to each other, but you can’t always put everything behind you but sometimes you can. […] It’s a remarkable story.
