Name: Illuminating Art: Profile of Islamic Manuscript Illumination artist Unaiza Karim by Aparita
Duration: 5 min 23 s
Description: Born in London, England, now based in Hamilton, Ontario, Unaiza Karim is an artist who creates beautiful works of Islamic Manuscript Illumination. Her practice goes much deeper than creating decorative pieces, however, as she explains in this story.

In 2018, Audrey Gillan sat down on a doorstep beside two rough sleepers and started documenting their lives. The Radio 4 series Tara and George took us on a sometimes chaotic, often poignant journey and asked what led the couple to the streets of East London.

Last autumn, Audrey was contacted out of the blue by Tara’s estranged brother. He had just been informed by ‘heir hunters’ that his big sister was dead. The family did not know how, when, or where Tara had died or even if she had had a funeral. And so began another journey, this time to discover what had happened to Tara and to ask how - in death as in life - she could fall between the cracks of society.

In Last Rights, Audrey seeks answers to both questions.

Music by Alice Boyd

First broadcast 16th February 2025, BBC Radio 4
Presented and produced by Audrey Gillan with Alan Hall

Last Rights

In his memoir of surviving the brutal apartheid prison Robben Island, South African activist Sedick Isaacs recalls an extraordinary event about which little has been recorded - "the creation and training of the eighty-member choir [of political prisoners] for the production of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus'.

The incongruous beauty of the choir’s performance – and the rich history of the Messiah in South Africa – is brought to life by former political prisoners, by musicians and academics who reveal the power of music as it was experienced on the Island – music as escape, protest, refuge and salvation.

Original compositions, mixing and production by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder
Hallelujah Chorus – reconstruction arranged and conducted by Leon Starker
with singers from Fezeka Secondary School in Gugulethu under the leadership of Monde Mdingi, with additional singers from across Cape Town
Also featuring: The South African Messiah, a translation of Handel’s Messiah by Michael Masote
Archival tape courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives, Villon Films and the SABC
With special thanks to Marcus Solomon, Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, Kutlwano Masote, Christopher Cockburn, Maraldea Isaacs and Lebohang Sekholomi

First broadcast 18th February 2025, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Catherine Boulle

Robben Island's Hallelujah

The story of how a heterosexual, Indian immigrant to England, ignorant of the gay scene, ended up delivering heartfelt eulogies to 30 homosexual men at the height of the AIDS crisis.

The experiences of Suresh Vaghela take us behind the headlines of the infected blood scandal and into a transformative relationship between a hemophiliac and the people who he came to regard as his new family.

(Including extracts from the BBC Sound Archive and from the 1975 World In Action documentary Blood Money, Granada TV)
Music by Jeremy Warmsley

First broadcast 23rd February 2025, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Nicolo Majnoni
Executive Producer: Alan Hall

Thirty Eulogies

Estimates from NSPCC suggest around 1 in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused. This documentary brings together survivors whose experiences span different backgrounds, relationships and generations - challenging misconceptions that abuse only happens in certain communities.

Through intimate conversations with Laura, Bryony, Joe, and Chris, we witness how institutional silence has allowed abuse to become endemic.

At a time when child sexual abuse is making headlines, these survivors offer crucial insight into what real justice looks like, and how society must act to protect children while supporting those whose lives have been irrevocably changed by abuse.

Voices: Laura, Bryony, Joe and Chris from IICSA Changemakers
Consultant: Natalie Dormer, Ambassador for NSPCC
Sound design and music by Phoebe McIndoe
Production Support: Clare Kelly & Denise Pringle

First broadcast 2nd March 2025, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Phoebe McIndoe assisted by Tess Davidson

The Endemic Truth

'Listen to everything all the time, and remind yourself when you’re not…'

For her 21st birthday, Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was given a tape recorder. It changed her life. She recorded sounds outside her window, then played the tape back, and heard things she hadn’t previously noticed. Thus began her philosophy of listening and sonic exploration.

Pauline Oliveros became a virtuoso accordionist, ground-breaking composer and experimentalist, and pioneering member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, who went on to develop the practice of ‘Deep Listening’. She was, 'an artist, a thinker, whose life’s work was around opening up listening as an anti-hierarchical form of transformation for everyone'.

Archive interviews reveal her energy and creativity, her generosity, her self-confidence, her activism, her responses to sexism – all underpinned by her deep commitment to equity, and her playful humour.

Featuring reflections and observations from:
Annea Lockwood, composer and long-time friend,
Irene Revell, curator, writer and researcher,
Louise Gray, writer, and teacher of Sound Arts,
Maria Chávez, sound artist, abstract turntablist and DJ,
Stephanie Loveless, Director of the Center for Deep Listening

Archive courtesy of the Oral History of American Music (1983 and 1998 interviews) at Yale University, KPFA interviews (1972 and 1985) from the Other Minds archive, plus BBC interviews (1993, 2009, 2012, 2016).

Image credit Paula Court

First broadcast 16th March 2025, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Steve Urquhart

Afterwords: Pauline Oliveros 1/3

In later life, the novelist Anthony Burgess said he wished people would think of him as "a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side".

As well as writing about music - most famously in A Clockwork Orange and his non-fiction book This Man and Music - there are over 300 works composed over a 50-year span, from preludes and fugues for keyboard via a 'flatulent fanfare' for four tubas (dedicated to an eminent - and scornful - music critic) to orchestral works.

This episode of Afterwords explores Burgess's musical ambitions and abilities and reveals new insight into his antagonistic relationship with the musical establishment. With Belgian pianist Stephane Ginsburgh, American musicologist Christine Lee Gengaro, the British academic Christopher Wintle and Professor Andrew Biswell of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.

The premiere of Burgess's sketch 'Homage to Hans Keller' has been specially recorded by Crystal Palace Band tuba section.

Other music includes extracts from:
Blooms of Dublin (first broadcast in February 1982), the musical version of A Clockwork Orange and Burgess' setting of The Brides of Enderby,
Symphony in C (BBC Philharmonic conducted by Michael Francis, first broadcast in October 2017),
Manchester Overture (BBC Philharmonic conducted by Juanjo Mena, first broadcast September 2013),
Wendy Carlos: Ninth Symphony (Scherzo), from the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange,
The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard - Prelude no. 22, Fugue no. 17, Prelude no. 23 (performed by Stephane Ginsburgh)
and private recordings of Burgess at the piano.

First broadcast 23rd March 2025, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Alan Hall with Phoebe McIndoe.

Afterwords: Anthony Burgess 2/3

The musician Pierre Boulez - one of the dominant composers of the 20th century and a deeply respected conductor - is perhaps most widely known for his iconoclastic utterances, suggesting we 'blow the opera houses up' and that 'all art of the past must be destroyed'.

In the week of what would have been his 100th birthday, figures who were close to him - the composer George Benjamin and the pianist Mitsuko Uchida - and others who have been touched by his thinking - Errollyn Wallen, Master of the King's Music, and Gillian Moore, former Director of Music at the Southbank Centre in London - engage with Boulez's creativity, his personality (an uncompromising, faultlessly charming manner) and his lasting legacy.

First broadcast 30th March 2025, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Alan Hall with Phoebe McIndoe

Afterwords: Pierre Boulez 3/3

As a child, Nathalie Olah would ask for toy garages and racing tracks for Christmas. Every person in her family drove a Rover car. Most of them worked at the vast car plant at Longbridge, southwest of Birmingham, at the foot of the Lickey Hills where Tolkien had been inspired to write The Lord of the Rings. Cars, to her, were just as fantastical.

Nathalie revisits the story of Britain's leading volume car producer, from its origins in 1904 to the iconic Mini, the much-derided Austin Allegro and the suped-up 'boy racer' models of the Phoenix Four, through years of industrial disruption, nationalisation, foreign ownership and bankruptcy.

With voices from the BBC Sound Archive and new interviews with former Rover employees Alison Debenham (track worker), Giovanni Esposito (chassis engineer) and Ian Murter (showroom salesman).

First broadcast 29th March 2025, BBC Radio 4
Co-produced by Nathalie Olah and Alan Hall

A Child Of Rover

Since last September, 68-year-old Laila Soueif has been on hunger strike. Laila is the mother of Alaa Abdel Fattah, a British national imprisoned in Egypt for the best part of 12 years. He is one of Egypt's highest profile pro-democracy political prisoners who was due to have been released in late 2024.

The refusal of the Egyptian authorities to free this peaceful activist triggered Laila's act of maternal determination.

Photo by Misan Harriman

First broadcast 13th April 2025, BBC Radio 4
Presented by Michael Segalov
Produced by Michael Segalov and Andrea Rangecroft

Laila Soueif: A Mother's Life

Born in London, England, now based in Hamilton, Ontario, Unaiza Karim is an artist who creates beautiful works of Islamic Manuscript Illumination. Her practice goes much deeper than creating decorative pieces, however, as she explains in this story.

Illuminating Art: Profile of Islamic Manuscript Illumination artist Unaiza Karim

I'm a freelance journalist based out of Toronto. While my beat is mainly the arts, I also report on a variety of other subjects, with a special interest in intersections of race and ethnicity.

Illuminating Art: Profile of Islamic Manuscript Illumination artist Unaiza Karim

Aparita

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