Hugh Brody on Private Passions with Michael Berkeley 22nd January 2023

Brought up in a comfortable suburb of Sheffield, Hugh Brody has spent his life travelling to the most inhospitable corners of the world. For more than ten years he lived among the peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, learning their languages, discovering their ways of being in the world, and helping map their territories so they could claim land rights. He has also worked in isolated villages in the west of Ireland, in the southern Kalahari, on Skid Row in Edmonton, Canada, and in tribal communities in western India.

He has explored these places over the last fifty-five years in a considerable body of work: more than a dozen films, dozens of essays, and ten books. The latest is a moving and beautifully written personal memoir, “Landscapes of Silence: from Childhood to the Arctic”. Married to the actress Juliet Stevenson, Hugh Brody now divides his time between Highgate, North London, and a house on the Suffolk coast, though he admits that he has never really “settled down”.

Hugh Brody’s music choices include Beethoven, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Clara Schumann, and the music he heard every day when living with an Inuit family: Johnny Cash.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio