It's a blog and a podcast, about libraries and reading and our love of both. All from Falkirk in beautiful Central Scotland
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Welcome to my library of interviews... Librarians, bestselling authors and our wartime generation sharing their love of books, reading and some extraordinary stories . #Hidden History #Forgotten women #Bibliotherapy #Libraries INTRODUCTION Welcome to From the Library With Love. A podcast for anyone whose life has been changed by reading. I’m Kate Thompson. Wonderful, transformative things happen when you set foot in a library. In 2019 I uncovered the true story of a forgotten Underground lib ...
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Library professionals are passionate about a lot of things. Be it the pop culture they consume or the databases that drive their libraries, Library Land Loves A Lot!
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The Women Who Ruled the East End: Remarkable Tales of Wartime London
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Send us a Text Message. The BBC’s period drama “Call the Midwife” made an eccentric, lovable community of nuns and nurses famous the world over. But what of the formidable East End mothers whose babies they delivered? Join me, Kate Thompson and Smithsonian historian Alan Capps as we delve deep into the social history of some truly remarkable women.…
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85 years on from the end of the Spanish Civil War, author Maggie Brookes uncovers its hidden heroes. Plus the extraordinary war story she found in a lift!
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Send us a Text Message. Maggie Brookes is an ex-journalist, BBC TV producer and creative writing lecturer, now full-time novelist and poet. She was born in London and has been writing stories and poems since she was six. Maggie says: "The principal theme which recurs in my work is the strength and courage of women in adversity. I am drawn to storie…
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99-year-old Holocaust survivor and US Army veteran George Leitmann on the emotional search for his father, the day he discovered a concentration camp and how he kept his cool interrogating Nazi war criminals ...
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Send us a Text Message. 99-year-old Professor George Leitmann is a unique man. He is both a holocaust survivor and a WW2 US Army veteran who helped to liberate Nazi occupied France and Germany. Nazi persecution of Jewish people forced George and his family to flee their home in Austria and emigrate to the USA. Tragically, his father Josef was unabl…
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Sent away by sea: the forgotten history of WWII’s ‘seaevacuees'. Meet the heroine at the heart of an astonishing survival story.
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Send us a Text Message. In this episode, award-winning historical fiction author, Hazel Gaynor remembers the World War Two ‘seaevacuees’, the children sent away from Britain by sea to escape the bombings at home. This is an often-forgotten part of the history of the war, overshadowed by more familiar events, and it inspired Hazel to write her new n…
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Meet the Sugar Girls of Love Lane. New social history book set in Tate & Lyle's Liverpool factory in the sixties offers a glimpse of a long vanished era.
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Send us a Text Message. In The Sugar Girls of Love Lane, out today, Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller The Sugar Girls, tell the remarkable stories of those who worked at the famous Tate & Lyle factory in Liverpool. For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love…
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Meet the wartime librarians of Occupied Paris. Bestselling author of The Paris Library, Janet Skeslien Charles, on how reading gives us a privacy of the mind
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Send us a Text Message. ‘Reading gives us a privacy of the mind. Librarians are heroes.’ Librarian turned bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles told me. In this episode we discuss the remarkable true story behind the brave Parisian librarians in WW2 who inspired The Paris Library. Her new book, Miss Morgan's Book Brigade, out April 30 2024, bas…
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112 years ago today, RMS Titanic struck an iceberg. Historian Claes-Göran Wetterholm reveals some heartbreaking, untold personal stories…
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Send us a Text Message. This year marks 112 years since the Titanic hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912, and in that time the doomed vessel has spawned countless myths, thousands of books and, of course, James Cameron’s Oscar-winning film Titanic . But In our quest to get to get closer to the so-called ‘Ship of Dreams’ have we overlooked the human trag…
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Meet the French librarian who trained as a Board Game Librarian and revolutionised her library in lockdown!
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Send us a Text Message. Libraries are about so much more than books. Just ask librarian for Kingston Upon Thames, Marion Tessier, who trained as a boardgame librarian. On National Boardgame Day, she gives us a fasincating glimpse into her job. Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. …
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Meet the librarians who rescued the books the Nazis burnt and plundered
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Send us a Text Message. Brianna Labuskes is more than just a gifted writer, she is a story hunter, who delves deep into the past and finds histories forgotten heroines. In this fascinating conversation, Brianna shares the true story of the Council of Books in Wartime--the WWII organisation founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors…
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Rounding up randy runaway sheep and delivering twin lambs whilst making gravy. Welcome to the multitasking world of the Devon Shepherdess.
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Send us a Text Message. It's March, the month of daffodils, pussy willow and lambs - what better time to pay a visit to Twig Farm! Paula Steer is one of a new breed of shepherdesses blazing a trail across social media. Paula’s been farming sheep farm at Twig Farm in Devon for the past twenty years, following in the footsteps of her great-great gran…
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Travel back to Victorian Brighton and discover a shadowy world of erotic tableaux, gangsters and music-hall artistes in Jacquie Bloese's atmospheric new novel
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Send us a Text Message. Historical fiction author, Jacquie Bloese draws her inspiration from atmospheric locations with intriguing histories, and people – both real and imaginary – whose stories are calling out to be told. Her latest release, The Golden Hour, set in Victorian Brighton is a compelling and deeply atmospheric read. In this fascinating…
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Channel Islands under Occupation. From the library to the post office, Jersey is an island simmering with stories and secrets
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Send us a Text Message. To celebrate the launch of my thirteenth book, The Wartime Book Club, historical fiction author Iona Grey has turned the tables and is asking me the questions. In this discussion we talk about the Occupation of the Channel Islands, how I discovered and researched the story, how and why we write and SO much more. I hope you e…
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Famine. Revolution. Rebellion. A history of Paris, seen through the windows of a tiny Montmartre bakery
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Send us a Text Message. From the author of The School for German Brides, this captivating historical novel by Aimie K.Runyan is set in nineteenth-century and post-World War II Paris follows two fierce women of the same family, generations apart, who find that their futures lie in the four walls of a simple bakery in a tiny corner of Montmartre. In …
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School librarian by day, novelist by night. Meet the author who threw herself from an aeroplane in the name of research.
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Send us a Text Message. Louise Moorish is a multifaceted woman. School librarian by day, novelist by night. Here Louise tells how she ‘broke through the wall’ and got that publishing deal for Operation Moonlight – after 50 rejection letters from literary agents. Louise also shares her top tips on how to get a reluctant child to read, the haunted li…
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The French resistance heroine who stole my heart. An exclusive glimpse into the research and writing of best-selling historical fiction author Natasha Lester.
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Send us a Text Message. Congratulations to international bestselling author, Natasha Lester, on the publication of her latest book, The Disappearance of Astrid Briccard out in North America today. Natasha is known to her army of fans around the world for her evocative and escapist storytelling, focusing on the women the history books forgot. In thi…
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'I married the soldier who helped liberate me from Bergen-Belsen' On Holocaust Memorial Day, survivor Renee Salt shares her astonishing story.
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Send us a Text Message. Holocaust survivor Renee Salt has seen things no human should ever witness, much less an innocent 15-year-old girl. Her experiences of Łódź Ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and then Bergen-Belsen bear witness to some of the foulest atrocities of the past. And yet, this remarkable 94-year-old woman tells her story of surviving unsp…
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Spies, espionage and secrets in an antiquarian bookshop. Author Louise Fein shares the true story behind her propulsive new novel, The London Bookshop Affair,
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Send us a Text Message. Louise Fein is a bestselling historical fiction writer of books set mainly in the early half of the twentieth century. Her novels explore turbulent times, social change, ideas and themes still relevant today. Her latest release, out this week, The London Bookshop Affair is a is a gripping story of secrets and love set agains…
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What happened to the children stolen by the Nazis? USA Today bestselling author Andie Newton shares a heartbreaking wartime story.
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Send us a Text Message. Andie Newton is the USA Today bestselling author of THE GIRLS FROM THE BEACH, THE GIRL FROM VICHY and THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND. She has a Bachelor’s degree in History from Washington State University and a Master in Teaching. In this conversation we talk about, A Child for the Reich. inspired by the Nazi kidnapping programme, …
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Britain's best-loved saga writer Nancy Revell on how Gone with the Wind changed her life and the secrets to writing books that readers take to their hearts.
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Send us a Text Message. Congratulations Nancy Revell on the publication of her new book, A Widow’s Choice, out today! Sometimes a book comes along which readers take to their hearts. When Nancy Revell wrote The Shipyard Girls it was an instant success. By the time she had finished Book 12 in the series it continuously made the Sunday Times bestsell…
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Come inside one of London’s dreamiest churches, the famous St Bride's on Fleet Street and hear how a Blitz raid revealed a secret charnel house and the ruins of Roman pavement, plus it’s surprising link ...
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Send us a Text Message. St Bride's Church on London’s Fleet Street is one of the most famous and fascinating historic churches in central London. It is known worldwide as the journalists church, offering a spiritual home to all who work in the media. What other churches have risen from the ashes of The Great Fire of London and the Blitz, acted as a…
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Could you be living over a plague pit? Meet the cemetery and death historian who uncovered a plague pit under Argos. Sam Perrin hunts out London's forgotten graves and shares what the dead can teach us ...
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Send us a Text Message. For many years now I have tramped the streets of east London in search of history. Unbeknown to me another woman has also been doing the same, but her gaze is fixed on the history you cannot see, the history beneath our feet. Sam Perrin has been a cemetery and death historian for over twenty years, conducting tours of east L…
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On National Letter Writing Day, meet the woman who collects forgotten letters. " In attics, drawers and shoe boxes under beds there are hundreds of stories waiting to be told."
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Send us a Text Message. Letter writing is a dying art, but fortunately, there are some wonderfully creative souls around resurrecting old love letters and breathing life into them. One of them is Liz Maguire, the love letter collector and originator of https://www.fleamarketloveletters.com , originally from Washington D.C. and now living in Dublin.…
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'I sat on the train & wondered if i’d ever see my family again!’ On the 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport scheme, which saved 10,000 children from the Nazis, 97-year-old Gabriele Keenaghan shares ...
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Send us a Text Message. You’re 12 years old. Your mother is dead and your father has gone missing. You are wrenched from everyone you know and love and put on a train and sent from your home to a new country, where you don’t speak the language, with a group of total strangers. And you have no idea whether you will ever set eyes on your family again…
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Meet the Guinea Pig Club. The astonishing story of the Allied Airmen who formed WW2’s most unique club. A tale of unsung heroines, pioneering surgery and sex in the linen cupboard!
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Send us a Text Message. 20th July 1941. It is a dark night in war-torn Britain. In blacked out Sussex a band of men sit huddled in an old shed, deep in the countryside. One by one they make a pledge to join a very special little wartime club. A toast is drunk to the forming of The Guinea Pig Club. It was the most exclusive club in the world, but as…
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Who was the real Ronnie Biggs? Sixty years on from the Great Train Robbery, his biographer and friend gives us a glimpse into his colourful and audacious life.
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Send us a Text Message. August 2023 marked 60 years since one of the most iconic crimes of the 20th century – the Great Train Robbery. Ronnie Biggs emerged as the most notorious member of the gang, and today is synonymous with the 1960s as Lord Lucan and the Profumo Affair. In this conversation, his biographer and friend Chris Pickard gives us a gl…
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Confessions of a ghost-writer. Meet the bestselling writer you've never heard of as she reveals publishing's best-kept secret.
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Send us a Text Message. She’s written 24 books, many of them critically acclaimed, four of them Sunday Times Bestsellers and one of them in just three weeks, but you’ve probably never heard of her. Shannon Kyle is a ghost-writer. Ghost-writing has long been publishing’s best-kept secret. An estimated ninety per cent of memoirs and non-fiction books…
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Send us a Text Message. Susan McBeth is a woman steeped in books. She founded Adventures by the Book in 2011 to bring literature to life for readers and book clubs through interesting, unique, and adventurous events and travels with authors. In 2018, she also founded NovelNetwork, a service that provides assistance connecting book clubs and authors…
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Vanishing Voices of Wartime London. Meet the proud cockneys who survived being blown up, machine-gunned and being buried alive!
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Send us a Text Message. Welcome to a special episode, in which I seek out east London’s vanishing wartime voices. From my experience cockneys aren’t a dying breed, they are alive and flourishing, part of the cockney diaspora of Essex, Suffolk, Kent and even as far afield as Australia. What is in danger of disappearing are the vanishing voices of wa…
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Send us a Text Message. The strikingly handsome couple looked like they’d stepped straight out of a Hollywood motion picture from the glamorous golden era. The reality was somewhat different. Anka and Bernd met in Nazi occupied Prague, in 1940 and it was love at first sight across a crowded nightclub. Like it was for so many young couples in wartim…
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Discover the hidden history of an underground village in East London. Join Siddy Holloway, presenter of Secrets of the Underground and wartime Blitz survivor Ray as we celebrate a unique wartime community ...
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Send us a Text Message. 101 years ago today a large crowd assembled on a crisp October morning in 1922, when Bethnal Green’s first permanent public library opened its doors in a handsome red brick building in Barmy Park. The philanthropy of Scottish businessman Andrew Carnegie provided £20,000, and the remaining £16,000 was raised by the local auth…
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Libraries Week - Saturday. The surprising history of libraries in wartime. Bodice-rippers in the blackout, steamy shelter novels and how wartime women changed the way we read today.
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Send us a Text Message. So many readers have got in touch with me since reading The Little Wartime Library to tell me how much they enjoyed reading about libraries in wartime, a facet of history many of us know so little about. When I began to research the novel I realised I knew precious little about the history of librarianship, so I was lucky en…
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Libraries Week - Friday. Meet the librarian documenting the weird and wonderful things she finds left behind in library books! "Each item is an anonymous glimpse into someone’s life"
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Send us a Text Message. You can never be sure what you’ll discover in the pages of a book. That’s even more true if that book is checked out from a library. In twenty years of library work Sharon McKellar from Oakland Library in California has been documenting the weird and wonderful things she finds in library books. From recipes, to kids drawings…
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Libraries Week - Thursday. It's National Poetry Day. Karen Smith of the National Poetry Library opens the doors to her magical library
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Send us a Text Message. ‘We run a ‘Lost Quote’ service here at the National Poetry Library,’ said Karen Smith, who also told me proudly that nothing feels as natural to her as being a librarian. Lucky Karen is surrounded by poetry books, 250,000 of them to be precise. ‘People contact us all the time. Today I have had two enquiries from people who a…
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Libraries Week - Wednesday. Powerful. Seditious. Pioneering. Meet the librarian breaking the rules.
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Send us a Text Message. Powerful. Seditious. Pioneering. Not adjectives you would usually associate with librarianship, John Pateman is a passionate believer in creating needs-based libraries and why libraries are about so much more than books. John Pateman has worked in the library system for 44 years, working his way up from a library assistant a…
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Send us a Text Message. Last year, spoke with Kathleen Milne, a librarian responsible for the running of four remote libraries, each on a Hebridean island. Speaking from Stornoway on the Island of Lewis, she was angry when she told me. ‘Here, like everywhere else in the UK, the last decade has been nothing but fire-fighting. Some libraries have bee…
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Libraries Week - Monday. Meet the husband and wife librarian team smashing the sssh stereotype.
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Send us a Text Message. It’s Libraries Week! To celebrate, I’m releasing one episode everyday this week with some remarkable, creative and courageous librarians with weird and wonderful stories to tell. Meet Angela and Simon Bond. They’re the husband and wife librarian team smashing the sssh stereotype. When Angela and Simon Bond are in Pontefract …
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How to write under three pen names, by author Becca Mascull
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Send us a Text Message. There are few writers who manage to successfully pull off three genres and write under three different names. Rebecca Mascull writes historical fiction under her real name, saga trilogies under the pen name of Mollie Walton and is shortly due to launch feel good romantic comedies under the pen name Harper Ford. Her new novel…
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Underground libraries and clandestine book clubs! New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London, Madeline Martin, gets up close to history and tells us why she keeps a magnifying glass ...
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Send us a Text Message. Madeline Martin is not only a New York Times bestselling historical fiction author, she is frank, funny and oh so eloquent about the craft of writing and research. She has written over 30 romance novels and three historical fiction novels. In this lively and eye-opening episode she tells us why 4am starts are essential and s…
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Author of The Midwife of Auschwitz, Anna Stuart on uncovering the torment of the Abba star with the Nazi father and the courageous midwife who delivered 3000 babies in Auschwitz.
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Send us a Text Message. Anna Stuart is international time traveller, roaming the past for stories. The historical fiction writer turns out three novels a year, writing under two different pseudonyms. As Joanna Courtney she wrote a trilogy set in the 11th century, Queens of Conquest and as Anna Stuart, she writes WW2 fiction. Her recent novel, The M…
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Author Gill Paul uncovers a ruthless rivalry, scandal and the great clash of the beauty titans!
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Send us a Text Message. Gill Paul is an international bestselling historical fiction writer, specialising in the twentieth century and often focussing on the lives of real women. Her novels have topped bestseller lists in the US and Canada as well as the UK and have been translated into twenty languages. Her latest novel, A Beautiful Rival, reveals…
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Send us a Text Message. Heather is the author of international bestselling novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which has sold over eight million copies, been published in 49 countries and spawned a new genre of Holocaust books. A major TV multi-part drama series based on the Tattooist is also in production. Heather has gone from being, in her words, …
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100-year-old Bletchley Park Codebreaker, Charlotte 'Betty' Webb on keeping her wartime secrets
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Send us a Text Message. Bletchley Park, Britain’s secret centre of code breaking housed the finest minds of a generation, and has always been perceived as a predominately male institution. Countless books, films and documentaries have paid tribute to the genius of eccentric code-breakers like Alan Turing, widely regarded to have brought the war to …
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Bestselling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri on learning to write what she feels, the power of storytelling and how happiness is found in a Greek deli on the Piccadilly Line.
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Send us a Text Message. Christy Lefteri is the award-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been published in 40 countries. The Book of Fire is her spellbinding third novel. In this conversation we talk about how dry statistics are humans with the tears dried off, but storytelling has the p…
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Por Kate Thompson
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Dr. Michael Stephens joins us to chat about empathy - why it's important and tools to help us develop our empathy muscles. Adjacent to the important topic of empathy is compassion fatigue and how the work that we do requires us to take care of ourselves, to step out our work roles, take time for dreaming and find joy in our lives and our work. Join…
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On July 8, 2022 Canada experienced one of the largest telecomm outages in recent memory when Rogers Communications experienced a massive network failure. Millions of people were unable to access wifi, or process debit transactions, and even getting a cup of coffee proved difficult. Today three library systems are sharing their stories of how they h…
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Nancy Cooper, First Nation Communities READ coordinator is here to tell us all about the program, this year's 2022/2023 selected titles and how you can learn more and get involved. Links from the episode: First Nation Communities READ website Goodminds.com First Nations Public Library Week website FNPLW Poster Follow @FNCReads Follow Michelle @city…
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This week we're talking about banned books with host and creator of The Stacks podcast, Traci Thomas. Earlier this year Traci hosted a five part series on banned books where she had some really interesting conversations with librarians, authors, students, teachers, performers, politicians, and bookstore owners. The series explored all the nuances a…
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This keynote conversation was recorded at the 2022 OLA Super Conference. Get obsessed with us. OLA is thrilled to bring the hosts of National Public Radio’s Pop Culture Happy Hour to chat about how pop culture will save us all. From lowbrow to highbrow, what culture are we consuming during our pandemic journey? And more importantly, what culture is…
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Podcasters Panel: A Glimpse Behind the Microphone (recorded at the 2022 OLA Super Conference)
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Many libraries now make their own podcasts, but there are also people who make library and book-related podcasts outside of their jobs. Panelists will discuss why they make podcasts, how they engage with their audiences, what makes a successful podcast, balancing work vs podcasting, and where they’d like to see podcasting go in the future. Thank yo…
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