Author Kate Thompson’s new podcast celebrates buried wartime history
Author Kate Thompson’s new podcast, From the Library With Love, offers listeners a weekly insight into the forgotten stories of the wartime generation.
Kate Thompson has launched a new podcast aiming to uncover the buried history of the wartime generation. In each episode, Thompson interviews the authors and librarians who dedicate their lives to preserving the past through books.
Thompson is a journalist, author and library campaigner. While Thompson lives in Sunbury-on-Thames with her husband and two sons, her creative fiction has focused on the history of East End London, particularly the forgotten feats of the female wartime generation.
Her new podcast, From the Library With Love, marks Thompson’s latest attempt to fill in the missing gaps from the historical record. So far, guests have included Heather Morris, author of the bestselling novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, as well as 100-year-old Betty Webb, a former Bletchley Park codebreaker who as a 17-year-old worked alongside Alan Turing to crack the Enigma Code, bringing World War II to an end.
Thompson’s first book, The Stepney Doorstep Society, published in 2018, uncovered the unsung achievements of East End matriarchs whose war efforts went unrecognised by official historical narratives. Her seventh and most recent novel, The Little Wartime Library (2022), exposes the buried history of an Underground Library built along the tracks of Bethnal Green during the Blitz.
In her transition from author to podcast host, Thompson has expanded her horizons beyond the East End. From the Library With Love celebrates ordinary and extraordinary people and stories from all over the world.
Thompson plans to interview Tara Lipsyncki, a drag performer from Utah, whose story in the news caught Thompson’s eye. Lipsyncki was scheduled to perform her monthly drag storytelling event at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City before the bookshop received a shock bomb threat.
Thompson was inspired by Lipsyncki’s resilience in the face of violent intolerance. Thompson said:
‘I’m interested in people breaking the mould and fighting censorship.’
Thompson is currently working on an episode called Vanishing Wartime Voices. Listeners will hear the voice of a Jewish woman called Sally who wrote Yiddish poetry during the war, and the memories of a gentleman who slept underground at Bethnal Green Station in the Blitz. She said:
‘All the guests talk in a way that is unique to the wartime East End. The women I’ve interviewed talk in a way you rarely hear on the streets anymore.
‘The podcast is my way of capturing their voices. You don’t hear that dialect anymore. These particular voices are so reminiscent of the 1940s.’
In the future, Thompson hopes to interview more local voices of Tower Hamlets. She would like to speak to Margie Keefe, aka Grime Gran, the 80-year-old YouTube sensation famous for her chats with young Grime artists in her Bethnal Green living room.
Thompson is fascinated by the rich history of East End London. One of her inspirations is Dorothy Smee, or Dot, who on her 91st birthday sang a song to a large crowd in Bethnal Green’s iconic Pellicci’s, a worker’s cafe from 1900. During the Blitz, Dot sang in the shelters in Bethnal Green. At the age of 91, she managed to silence the bustling Peccicci’s with the sound of her voice.
Thompson said:
‘The podcast is about sharing untold stories often hidden in the shadows.’
From the Library With Love launched on Sunday 26 August 2023 and is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
For more on podcasts, read Students launch podcast empowering minorities to break down personal barriers.
