How much can we truly know about the inner lives of others? Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Miles Leeson and Karen Leeder to reflect on the challenge of interpreting the minds and motivations of poets, both past and present.

Editor Miles Leeson presents Poems from an Attic, a newly published collection of Iris Murdoch’s previously unseen poetry. Found in a box long after her death, these intimate verses offer fresh insight into the desires of a writer better known for her novels and philosophy.

Professor Karen Leeder has spent much of her career studying the poetry of East Germany. Her recent translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 won this year's Griffin Poetry Prize 2025. Grünbein has written about the wartime bombing of his birth city Dresden and as a translator of classical authors, including Aeschylus and Seneca, his work features reflections on the relevance of the past and of antiquity in the present.

Nick Makoha's latest volume of poetry The New Carthaginians draws on an eclectic range of artistic, historic and cultural sources from the politics of 1970s Uganda to the myth of Icarus and the exploded collages of the neo-expressionist art movement. He writes employing symbols and traditions in startling ways to transform what we might think we know into something completely new.

Producer: Ruth Watts