David Rodigan; Loudon Wainwright III; Jackie Malton; Hisham Matar

Midweek

Singer and songwriter Loudon Wainwright III; reggae DJ David Rodigan; former detective Jackie Malton and writer Hisham Matar join Libby Purves.

David 'RamJam' Rodigan MBE is a DJ, famed for his selections of reggae and dancehall music. He has played on stations from Capital 95.8 and Kiss to BBC 1Xtra and Radio 2 and is a regular on the club and festival circuit. A 65-year-old white man from Oxford who speaks in RP, he seems the very antithesis of the music that he loves and represents. In 2012 he won the highest reggae sound system honour by winning the World Clash Re-Set contest in New York. His autobiography, Rodigan: My Life in Reggae is published by Constable.

Hisham Matar is a Libyan writer and the son of Jaballa Matar, a prominent political activist who opposed Colonel Gaddafi's regime. When Hisham was 19 his father was kidnapped while the family were living in exile in Cairo. Hisham would never see his father again. After the fall of Gaddafi in 2011 Hisham was finally able to return to Libya to try to discover what happened to his father. In his memoir, The Return, he recounts his physical and psychological journey to find his father and rediscover his country. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, is published by Penguin.

Jackie Malton is a former detective chief inspector in the Metropolitan Police, best known for being the inspiration for the character of DCI Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect drama written by Lynda La Plante. Her police career started in Leicestershire and in the Met she went on to work in the Flying Squad of the 1980s. As an openly gay women in the police force during that time she found herself at odds in a male world but went on to forge a successful career before retiring to become a script consultant and addiction counsellor.

Loudon Wainwright III is a Grammy award-winning singer and songwriter. In his one man show, Surviving Twin, he connects some of his best songs with the writings of his late father Loudon Wainwright Jr, the highly regarded Life Magazine columnist. The show, which has never been performed in the UK, explores issues such as birth, loss, parenthood, pet ownership and mortality and Loudon intersperses a selection of his father's compositions with songs from his own catalogue. Surviving Twin is at the Leicester Square Theatre.

Producer: Paula McGinley.