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Juno Dawson joins panel for BBC Arts’ The Novels That Shaped Our World
Author, screenwriter and columnist Juno Dawson has joined the panel for the BBC’s The Novels That Shaped Our World.
BBC Arts is launching an "ambitious new season" across BBC TV and radio this autumn with a year-long festival celebrating the 200th anniversary of the English language novel and a series on how novels have shaped the world.
The Novels That Shaped Our World Festival, a multi-platform collaboration between the BBC, libraries and reading groups will reveal and explore the top 100 novels which have had an impact over the last three centuries and will accompany the three-part BBC Two series “The Novels That Shaped Our World”.
Dawson joins the panel of journalist and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, actor and writer Zawe Ashton, Bradford Festival Literary Director Syima Aslam, author Kit de Waal, journalist and editor of the Times Literary Supplement Stig Abell and author Alexander McCall Smith to choose the list.
The panel will appear on Radio 2’s Book Club to discuss deliberations before the 100 novels, all in the English language and all works of fiction, will be revealed at a live event hosted by Radio 2’s Jo Whiley at the British Library and streamed into libraries onto the Living Knowledge Network in late autumn 2019.
Dawson said: “I’m very excited to join the arts panel for The Novels That Shaped Our World, I can’t wait to get reading.”
The books will be presented in ten themed categories (Identity; Politics, Power and Protest; Rule Breakers; Love, Sex and Romance; Coming of Age; Adventure; Life, Death and Other Worlds; Class and Society; Family and Friendship and Crime and Conflict) and will fuel a year-long engagement campaign working closely with agencies including Libraries Connected, CILIP, the Library and Information Association and the Reading Agency and Publishers' Association. A series of library events are planned and information packs will be made available from January to October 2020 to reading groups for them to discuss and debate the categories and novels.
