Graham Fawcett

writer, teacher, translator and broadcaster

telephone: 020 7405 3997

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Broadcasting, Language Work and Publications

BROADCASTING

Graham Fawcett trained as a studio interviewer in the early 1980s with the then BBC Radio Talks and Documentaries department. Since then he has worked as a freelance deviser, writer and presenter of documentaries/features, mainly for BBC Radio 3 but also for Radio 4, the World Service and the Italian Service. Some programmes are in the National Sound Archive and are marked NSA below.

His programmes on literature for Radio 3 have included:

a new verse translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova commissioned by BBC Radio Drama and broadcast as 'A Voyage of Sighs' with Mike Gwilym as Dante Alighieri;
a play, Mozart's Bohemian Friend, about the Bohemian composer Josef Myslivecek;
“I definitely kept my promise to you to mention your radio play in the book--in fact, you and it are mentioned on the very first page of the main text. I'm delighted to have been able to do so. I simply loved what you did”. Daniel E Freeman, author of Josef Myslivecek, "Il Boemo": The Man and His Music(Detroit Monographs in Musicology) , 2009
Rewriting Venice, a feature about Byron, Henry James and Ezra Pound in Radio 3's Twenty Minutes slot;
“Very engaging and an exemplary pronunciation guide”.

“Very stimulating and more comprehensive than any other attempt at a culture-portrait of La Serenissima which I know of”. (Radio 3 listeners’ letters)
feature-length interviews with poets Miroslav Holub NSA, Ivan Lalic NSA, Thom Gunn, Adrienne Rich, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass and Galway Kinnell and with novelists Carlos Fuentes (Postponing Death (1986 - reviewed in the 'Out of the Air' feature in The Listener 14 August 1986 as 'Renaissance Buster Keaton'), Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Dacia Maraini (A Poisoned Thorn NSA), Aharon Appelfeld NSA and Nuruddin Farah;

documentaries about the British novel (Plot or Not NSA), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard,

including interviews with the Princess di Lampedusa, the author's widow, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, their stepson and the model for Tancredi in the novel, novelist Giorgio Bassani, and Suso Cecchi d'Amico who wrote the screenplay for Visconti's film of The Leopard

Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel may have been a best seller, even a popular film, but Graham Fawcett thinks there's more to it than a historical novel about the decline of the fortunes of an aristocratic family. Could it be an acuteobservation of the state of Italian politics and its apparently infinite caapcity for resisting change?" ('3' Magazine, November 1982)

Dante's Inferno, the Dante Translation Project at the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival NSA, the Cambridge Poetry Festival, and the teaching of creative writing in America;

studio discussions on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with A S Byatt and Gavin Ewart), the Struga International Poetry Festival in Macedonia and the Shelley Bicentenary in Italy (with Tony Curtis, Vicky Feaver and Adrian Mitchell) NSA; and
a report from Helsinki and Archangel Karelia about the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, for Night Waves.

Programmes about Italian composers have included:

documentaries on Luigi Dallapiccola and his life and music under Fascism (Out of Darkness NSA) and Luigi Nono (The Improbable Dream NSA);
Composer of the Week, as presenter on Berio (1995) and Cherubini/Spontini, and as interlocutor on Berio (1999); and
features on Puccini (The Tosca File NSA ), Mascagni (The Cavalleria Man NSA), Giordano (Who was Umberto Giordano ? NSA ), and Rossini (Beyond the Buffo); and
a report from the 2001 Aldeburgh Festival about the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.

Other music programmes:

two documentaries, in the 1999-2000 Radio 3 Sounding the Century series, on concert-halls and music-in- education in the 20^th century;
Composer of the Week as presenter on Honegger, and as deviser and researcher in 2000 on Satie, in 2001 on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Gounod, Lalo and Maurice Duruflé, in 2002 on Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Weber, the Bach Family, and Max Bruch and, in 2003, Hugo Wolf and Irving Berlin;
"The series on Irving Berlin is so fascinating it is keeping me from doing any work- delightful!"(Radio 3 listener)
Eastern Approaches - a series of four programmes NSA on the folk music of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Hungary;
67 editions of Mainly for Pleasure;
The Rush for Pelleas, comparing Fauré's, Schoenberg's and Sibelius's orchestral works in the light of Debussy's opera and Maeterlinck's play NSA;
an appearance at the Proms as co-presenter of an Indian music night and on Radio 3's Choirworks to talk about the Dream of Gerontius which Dvorak never wrote and yet in another sense had already written;
a report from Leipzig on the history of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra for the Proms season; and
Sex and Death in the City of Dreams, a feature on Korngold's operas NSA

Programmes of literature and music include:

Pastoral Sympathies, the first of eight documentaries for the 2001 Proms season, about the idea of Pastoral in poetry and music from ancient China to the present day;
Land of Heroes, on Sibelius and the Kalevala; and
Berio in the Labyrinth, a documentary tracing Luciano Berio's collaboration with the poet Edoardo Sanguineti and including interviews with both NSA.

Other features include:

Picture Postcards, Hanging Gardens and God, on how Second Viennese School composers set poetry to music NSA;
Life Before Carmen, on the lives of Prosper Merimée and Georges Bizet and the Carmen story;
Hair Today, on Samson in music and poetry;
Softest Music to Attending Ears, tracing the story of Romeo and Juliet in opera and theatre NSA;
The Unholy Office, literature, music and the Spanish Inquisition NSA; and
The Cloud and the Crag, on Rachmaninov's setting of Chekhov's short story 'On the Road' (abridged and dramatised). It was a wonderful necklace of delicate images and ideas. You have such an unusual ability to get down and really look and smell and touch both the little and the great. The woman had an insouciance (until the last minute) I will never have again. Your vignettes were zen-like. So many more impressions. The music was wonderful too. (Kate Fleming)

Graham Fawcett interviewed Luciano Berio before an audience in the Royal Festival Hall's Chelsfield Room prior to one of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Composer Portrait concerts in February 2000.

Radio 4 appearances include:

A Little Difference - an interview with the poet and political prisoner Jorge Valls Arango (reprinted in The Listener);
a feature on Crime Writing in Sardinia;
a documentary on the 1966 Florence Flood including interviews from eye-witnesses;

"You actually caught the real impact the flood made on people and made it present to millions of BBC listeners". (Mario Carmiani, Florence)
Kaleidoscope, Bookshelf, The Heritage Quiz; and
a Front Row discussion of the 2001 Botticelli's Dante exhibition at the R.A.

World Service appearances include:

A Question of Belief (review of Kingsley Amis's Collected Short Stories and Frederic Raphael's Oxbridge Blues)
In Search of the real Rupert Brooke (review of John Lehmann's Rupert Brooke: Life and Legend)

LANGUAGE WORK

Graham Fawcett taught a Saturday morning workshop on translation at Goldsmith's College from 1991 to 1996. He then devised and ran a course at Goldsmiths from 1997 to 2008 which prepared students for the Institute of Linguists' Diploma in Translation examinations (Italian and English). He now offers private coaching in preparation for this examination. See [translation coaching].

He has worked as a translator and interpreter in Italian for the last 35 years (including for the British Council in Britain and Venice); as a voice-over in both Italian and English for the last ten years; and, more recently, as a bilingual/monolingual media trainer for industry, specialising in issues relating to environment, health and safety. Published translations include Federico Fellini's Cinecittà (Studio Vista) and Giorgio Bagnoli's The La Scala Encyclopedia of Opera (Simon and Schuster).

PUBLICATIONS

Graham Fawcett's poems have appeared in Poetry Review and PN Review and have been broadcast on Radio 3, and his articles in The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Books and Bookmen, Magma and Poetry London. His lecture Imagination and the Classical Inheritance in Literature is published by The Guild of Pastoral Psychology (1999), and Poetry is Communication is in a new trilingual book of lectures, Poesia e Comunicazione, edited by Francesca Bugliani and Luca Panieri and published by Casa Editrice Lint, Trieste (2001).