Woman's Hour

The songwriter and pianist Kate Garner is the daughter of Chas Hodges of Chas and Dave fame. Chas’s mother, Daisy, recorded a special tribute to the Queen for the silver jubilee back in 1977. But to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, Kate has decided to continue the family tradition and has penned her own song called Platinum Queen. She performs live and tells Nuala McGovern how her song prompted a response from the Queen herself. For the first time this year the Women’s FA Cup Final was played on the same weekend as the men’s and matches are seeing record attendance levels. Despite all this success a recent study has found that 86% of players in the Women’s Super League and Championship wanted or needed clinical support at some point during their playing years. The Lead author of the report, Carly Perry ,from the University of Central Lancashire found that only 50% of clubs represented by participants offered psychological support. She joins us alongside Kelly Lindsey from Lewes FC which is the only club in the world to pay it’s men and women’s teams equally. The Women’s Prize for Fiction has launched a campaign to encourage more men to read novels by women. Why? Because the stats are currently alarming. The research, conducted for Mary Ann Sieghart’s The Authority Gap, found that of the top 10 bestselling female fiction authors, including Austen, Atwood and Agatha Christie, only 19% of their readers are men. In comparison, for the top 10 bestselling male authors the split in readers is much more even at 55% men and 45% women. In other words, women are prepared to pick up novels by men, but men are much more reluctant to read novels written by women, regardless of the genre. We talk to Kate Mosse a best-selling novelist, playwright and founder director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Amina Atiq is a Yemeni- Scouse poet, performance artist, creative practitioner and award-winning community activist. She was a BBC Words First Finalist in 2019. She joins Nuala McGovern to talk about her most recent project Poet’s Gift where she worked with young Muslims to create a group poem which has been published on a bus stop in Toxteth in Liverpool. Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Lisa Jenkinson Studio Engineers: Tim Heffer & Donald McDonald