Simon Schama Meets...

Ai Weiwei is arguably the world’s most famous dissident artist, celebrated for his prolific and profound output of sculpture, installation, architecture, photography and film-making, which is never afraid to take on systems of power and oppression. What is less well known, however, is his extraordinary backstory. His father was distinguished poet Ai Qing, who was a key cultural figure during the Communist rise to power but was one of over half a million intellectuals who fell afoul of the state during the Cultural Revolution. He lost everything and was exiled alongside his young son to ‘Little Siberia’ in northernmost China. For the first 20 years of his life, Ai Weiwei’s experience of his father was not as a writer but as an ‘enemy of the state’. Ai Weiwei tells Simon the harrowing story of his childhood, and his memories of his father’s stoicism in the face of decades of persecution. He reflects on the lessons he took from his father, above all that ‘freedom of expression is the fo

Nadya Tolokonnikova is one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, a Russian activist punk group who gained international notoriety for staging a guerrilla performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, resulting in two years in prison. Speaking to Simon not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the price of speaking the truth has grown higher still, Nadya explains that she is working harder than ever to fight for what she believes in. Being a radical protest artist has never been easy in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Nadya discusses with Simon how she sees herself and her fellow activists as part of a long tradition of radical, counterculture rebels in Russia. From the Bolshevik Revolution to now, there has always been a seam of Russian free thinkers who have dared to rebel against the norm in the face of overwhelming state oppression. Nadya reflects on the key moments in her life and career, from the early days of her guerrilla performance art, to the glob

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s most renowned and prolific writers of fiction, poetry and essays. She is best known for a series of darkly visionary novels - The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and The MaddAddam Trilogy - which tunnel into the darkest possibilities of what humans can do. Simon meets Margaret in Toronto at a time when the rights of women and the fate of the planet, ever-present concerns in her work, are at the forefront of many of our minds. Atwood gives her take on the seismic ruling of the United States Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade, and the consequences it will have on women’s rights in America. She reflects on how, in her view, the ruling was a long time coming, with the rise over decades of the evangelical Christian right wing, the very same movement that inspired her to write her iconic novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a book that has taken on even more relevance in our fractured times. Atwood explains the inspira