Suite (212)

This month, Juliet talks to authors Ewa Majewska and Kuba Szreder about how Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) intervened in art and culture following their election victory in December 2015, and what’s changed since Donald Tusk became Prime Minister on a pro-EU, centrist platform in 2023. They discuss PiS’s takeover of state television, appointment of numerous sympathisers within institutions such as Warsaw’s influential Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, and their manipulation of Poland’s complex 20th century history, culminating in the choice of conservative artist Ignacy Czwartos to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2024. They also talk about the protests against PiS’s anti-abortion laws and ‘LGBT-free zones’, Donald Tusk’s efforts to reverse some of these changes, and how left-wing cultural workers can respond to this depressingly familiar dynamic between the centre and the right.

In this edition of Suite (212), Juliet talks to former co-host Tom Overton about his long-awaited biography John Berger: From Life, published by Penguin. They discussed Tom’s encounter with the art critic, novelist, painter and poet Berger at the British Library, where he worked on Berger’s archives, and his approach to writing Berger’s biography. They also talked about how much Berger’s reputation rests on his seminal BBC television series Ways of Seeing (1972); Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G. and his decision to donate half the prize money to the Black Panthers; his ‘romantic Marxism’ and his responses to the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968; Berger’s staunch advocacy for Palestine; his consistent them of the relationship between the living and the dead; Berger’s later work amidst the end of cultural democracy, including his novel about the AIDS crisis, To the Wedding (1995); his works about migration and the peasantry; and the role of technology in Berger’s long life, from the advent of colour television to invention of the iPhone.

References for each programme are available to Patreon subscribers. To support the show for as little as £3 per month, go to https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212.

In our latest Session, Juliet talks to London-based Irish writer Keith Ridgway about his three most recent novels, Hawthorn & Child (2012), A Shock (2021) and Dooneen (2026), recently published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. They discussed the differences between novels and short story collections, and how much they matter; Keith’s fragmentary plots and open-ended use of the ‘detective’ genre; the way Irish ‘experimental’ writers are often read with a national lineage that begins with Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien; the way reformist and radical politics, from the Easter Rising to Corbynism, have been crushed by the British Establishment, and how that comes into Keith’s work; and the pressure on writers not to be pessimistic amidst dark times, and how Keith balances hope and despair in his novels.

In one of our most meta episodes to date, Juliet also asked Keith about his reticence about self-promotion and the obligation for contemporary writers to publicise themselves on social media, and about his scepticism regarding interviews with authors.

A full list of references is available to Suite (212) subscribers. To support us on Patreon for as little as £3 per month, please go to www.patreon.com/c/suite212.

In our latest session, Juliet talks to Kyiv-based filmmaker and writer Oleksiy Radynski about four of his works – his feature-length documentary Infinity According to Florian (202x), his two works about the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s infamous nuclear plant, Chornobyl 22 (2023) and the longer Special Operation (2025), and his docu-fiction Where Russia Ends (2024), using found footage from the Science Film Studio in Kyiv.

They discussed the project to save modernist buildings in Kyiv and the contradictions of the fight to preserve futurist architecture, as well as the experience of working with Soviet artist, musicologist and architect Florian Yuriev; how Oleksiy sourced the CCTV and other footage that made up his two Chornobyl films; the experience of working in Kyiv since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began; and the importance of understanding the nature of Russian colonial expansion and imperialist in the east, and its parallels with the occupation of the Americas.

For a full list of references from this episode, please subscribe via https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212 for as little as £3.50 per month.

In our latest Session, Juliet talks to film director, visual artist and composer Imran Perretta about his new feature film Ish (2025), due to be released in the UK and Ireland on 31 July, as well as his short film the destructors (2020) and his installation A Riot in Three Acts, first exhibited at Somerset House in 2024. They talked about how the works were shaped by Thatcherism and neoliberalism, the War on Terror and the genocide in Gaza, institutional racism and police profiling, as well as how the works combine formal experimentation with deeply personal narratives, bringing in cinematic influences such as Abbas Kiarostami, Steve McQueen and Cristian Mungiu.