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the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, as newsday continues straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk i am stephen sackur. in all cultures, all languages, there are writers whose imaginations prompt them to challenge the status quo. in democracies, they are called critical voices. in authoritarian regimes, they are labelled enemies of the state. my guest today — yhe novelist and playwright ariel dorfman — was forced into exile and saw his books burned in chile after the coup of 1973. he made a new life straddling the us and post—dictatorship chile, he's tasted international literary success with books full of ghosts and foreboding. why?

ariel dorfman in north carolina, welcome to hardtalk. i am so glad to be with you. we are delighted to have you. now, your latest book, the compensation beaureu. it is fascinating on many levels but if i had to, i guess i would describe it as a surreal apocalypse fantasy. is that because that is where you believe we human beings are right now? i think we are in danger of apocalypse certainly from climate change, from pestilence and especially from nuclear warfare, which i think is going to be easier to come by because of

climate change that is coming. wars for water, wars for land, wars for resources. but the novel is apocalyptic only towards the end, really. it began in a very different way as a, i don't know whether i should describe a little bit about what it's about so that we understand where it's going towards, white understand where it's going towards, what ends towards that. a lot of people around the world are watching and have read the book. briefly, give us a sense on what kind of world you have created. briefly, i imagine, being an atheist myself, i imagine a universe which is governed from its start by a series of guardians and custodians of all life in billions and billions of worlds. and one of these custodians, a woman, i made herfemale, discovers a glitch in a tiny

little speck called earth. a glitch in the dna which brings these people us, of course, towards warlike consistent violence over and over again. and she comes up with a plan that she cannot time travel backwards to fix the glitch, and she cannot go there personally because it's forbidden to interfere directly in human or other organisms affairs. she comes up with a compensation beareau that will take every human being has been unfairly killed or suffered and given a second chance, a virtual theatre of life, give them a second chance to live the live they didn't live, and this will have also the consequences are the consequences that comes towards the end is the revelation, the apocalypse is coming but none of this is helped at all to end this warlike quality that we suffer.

it is pretty bleak, you have to admit, and what i find fascinating about it and so much of your work, really exploring the good and the bad that exists within we human beings and this book is encouraging the notion of an audit of what is the really bad, cruel, inhumane and human beings, but clearly there is good and there is love too. which ultimately, without giving away the ending of your book, which do you think is going to triumph for us humans? love is going to triumph, finally. we are all going to die, not only our earth is going to die, but the whole universe is going to at some point either explode or implode and the love that was there, what i called the rain in the garden, you cannot erase that. and it's a love story because one of the overseers who every day has got to really create,

recreate a thousand lives, falls in love with one woman in particular and decides to go outside of the rules and give her over and over again because he is so in love with her, it is a voyeuristic fantasy, right? the woman that he cannot live with or touch, he gives her the wonderful life that she should have and he is caught with this and condemned to a certain punishment, which i do not want to reveal too much. but it has to deal with that sense that his love for her will end up having a great effect upon what humanity might possibly save itself from this apocalypse. i do not want to give away the ending. what i want to drill down we will get back to love later, but for now, what i want to drill down to is this compassion that you have and it is evoked in the book. for seeing things on the outside, i mean, here, the central character is an overseer, an actuary that looks from the outside, but it strikes me that

in your own life, you have been something of a detached outsider in the societies that you lived in for various complex personal reasons. do you feel like an outsider looking in? ifeel that, yes, let's say i've had to re—consignment being an outsider because and all my life is be inside, dance with the others, be a part of a group, be accepted and then i realised, especially during so many years of exile and expatriation. this is my condition, as a writer, this is what i can give others. as long as it is a compassionate outsider, i mean, i'm not just an outsider looking in and surveying, i'm somewhat of a voyeur myself, a gentle voyeur because that's what writers are. they are voyeurs of their own characters. i am looking at these characters, i'm looking at the world and trying to find way into that world so that it becomes clear to readers

or to spectators of my plays orfilms, or my poems, how they can go into that world with me and yet, say a certain sense of not being overwhelmed by the road itself. do you think it brings you a greater clarity of vision that fact that you are not fully of anywhere. you spent a lot of time and your young adulthood in chile but then you're forced to flee after the military coup in the toppling and the killing of salvador. you ended up in the united states and you are a us citizen, but nonetheless, you spend a lot of time in chile and in the spanish—speaking world. does the life you live now, does it give you a greater clarity of vision, do you think? i hope so. i think that it gives me

certain clarity concerning possibilities and i see myself as a bridge between different worlds. the world is made of overlapping communities and i belong to many different overlapping communities. the question is, this pluralism that we believe in democracy and society, can we not accepted also in our own selves that we have many cells inside ourselves this meant that we are many people, and we have many faces and many masks, and ifeel like i'm a bridge between two languages, english and spanish. i can go back between two different linkages into different cultures in two different opposing countries, which have been at odds with one another for a long time. different continents, and i think, that was not my choice. it wasn't what i want to my left turn out to be, i would've loved to have stayed back there forever in one place and right at the lake, that is not what happened. what is interesting is that you talk about the life that you led, and belonging in different places

but in a sense not being rooted in any of them. i'm just thinking that perhaps, the notion of being a truly internationalist person would have been very common and regarded as the norm in a certain sector of society in the 1990s and early 2000's when we all believe that the world was forever globalising. since then, things have changed. borders have been rebuilt, nationalism has been on the march, and we had a prime minister, theresa mary, who once said that everybody needed to be a citizen of somewhere rather theresa may, who once said that everybody needed to be a citizen of somewhere rather than a citizen of nowhere. so, maybe your internationalism is no longer the fashion? how about being the citizen of elsewhere? john once told my friend and said, i am a patriot of elsewhere. maybe that's a good place to be. at the same place, i have roots. at the same time, i have roots. i do have roots in my past

and my home is my wife of 56 years we have been married, it's my family, my friends. it is the memories that i've got, it is the sense of struggle. world, and have a home i have a home in that struggle for a better world, and have a home in my literature. every day i wake up and i imagine worlds where other people can come in, they can share with me and i have lived a series of experiences of the utmost terror and great hope. and i am buffeted between despair and that idea that we can do better end of the same time, iam not a preacher, iam not trying to preach, i am trying to disturb my readers, but i want them to ask these questions because it would not be easy to get out of the situation and we're talking by the beginning, if that apocalypse is coming and i think we are close to it, we're getting closer and closer to it, that we are only going to get out of it if we participate more and more and ask ourselves very difficult questions. the time for the intellectual

that i am and the imaginative writer that i am, to ask these difficult questions and you are helping me in that sense by getting my message or at least my person, my ideas out to many people, i would lay people to participate in that sense. i do not see myself as superior to them. ijust happen to have this quirk of the imagination which i cannot stop imagining things and thinking of things. you cannot stop imagining things and you imagine them in both spanish and english, and you're talking to me in english but you write poetry and plays and novels in both english and in spanish. you are truly even beyond bilingual, and i'm just wondering, is this sensability of imagination identifiably different from that of the english ariel dorfman? they are overlapping languages. i speak of them as i am married to two languages

but it is an adulterous relationship, i do not know who was the mistress and who was the wife, i do not know, i go between one and the other. this english that you are hearing, growing up in new york as a kid, as a child. this english you are hearing is somehow inhabited by the ghost of the spanish. traces of the spanish. it doesn't seem like that because my accent or because of my rather rhetoric in english, i was going to say my eloquence, but i botched it. but the point is, if english is inhabited by the spanish and the spanish has a residence inside itself of english. so when i am writing, there is a fusion of both in one person. i am a strange character. i want to ask you about two, briefly, i want to talk about two seminal moments. the first when you are a very small child we are about two and a half years old when your

parents first came to the united states of america, i think it was 1945, you were a sickly kid who had to be rushed to hospital with pneumonia and for at least three weeks, and this new country, a language that was new to you, you were completely separated from your parents, and it seems that you've written about, that had a traumatic effect on you, which has lived with you for the rest of your life. it determined my life, that hospital, i did not speak another word of spanish which is going to be my main language most of my existence, which is right now my main language and i refuse to speak it. i said i'm not speaking this language any more and they would say... he speaks spanish. i would say i don't understand what you're saying. i do not understand. and i know what happened there. i don't remember anything there, of the trauma, but i know that when i was in

that hospital, i felt abandoned by that language and i felt abandoned by my parents and its had other effects, i always try to please everybody, which is not very good, i wanted to be loved closely, excessively all the time, and... i think it is a form of fear, insecurity of what you could lose at any moment, so there that aspect to your character. and i did lose everything over and over again. let's get to... i lost chile again. and a seminal moment in your life, which is 1973, you are a successful young writer, you are working in chile and working as an adviser to salvador and you're a true believer in socialism, you're very excited about the future, and then it is all taken away from you and indeed all of the supporters of that government because the military move in and take over, kill him and you are forced to flee.

you have been living with that for the rest of your life too. i've been living with the fact that i always felt that i should have died with him and i didn't. it is difficult to explain but in my memoir, and that memoir, i explained that i should've been there. in a series of fortuitous coincidences saved my life, and i've been living ever since the idea that i am a ghost, but i am a survivor in some ways. but i also the sense that if i survive, it was to tell the story. it was so that someone would be able tell us the story. and not tell it in a one—sided way and saying these are the bad people, these are the good people. but what it has taught us, what those traumatic situations teach us about forgiveness, revolution, about change, but gentleness and about love? and i tried constantly to create that in compensation

bureau is one more step in the question of what do we do with the victims was mike but we do with the perpetrators? what do we do with the trees that are the victims of the perpetrators? what do we do with the world that is in such pain and how do we assuage that pain? how do we heal it? if we heal that pain, if we find a way of healing each other in some ways and understanding each other�*s as brothers and sisters in the earth, it is possible that we will be able to avoid the terrible things that i think are going to come if we do not find a way of loving each other as we should. many of us know you best for death of a madison, the play you wrote about a woman torture victim is brought face—to—face with her torturer. a supposed torturer. we do not know if it is him for sure, ijust want to make sure about that. now, it is three decades pretty much since you wrote that play, as you reflect on it, and it's notjust about chile,

it's about dictatorship and it's about cruelty, inhumanity and in many different corners of the world that many different times. what is your feeling about how, as you put it, to build those bridges between those who suffer and those who inflict the suffering? i believe in restorative justice. in other words, i do believe that's very important that the law punish those who have committed terrible crimes. but i also think it is important that each of us look inside of ourselves and find whatjoins us, both the victim and perpetrators. i don't think i have a little dictator inside myself, a little hitler. but ordinary people do terrible things. we have to create a situation that the play really asks the audience to look at themselves in the mirror and say, what can i do? how am i complacent

in the system? is their way in which i can change the way my life, my relationship to other people? can i get rid of the cruelty in everyday life? and, you know, it is a play which is about transition to democracy, which by the way, tends to be very important to the world today because democracy is under such assault and is being besieged so much in so many places that the play alas, is terribly relevant, and tortures happening everywhere, we havejournals being killed day by day, and people are being imprisoned and books are being burned. it is not as if the world has advanced that much. in certain ways we have advanced, in other ways we have not. but that play continues to be relevant as, i think most

of my other books do question that i go into that darkness and i do not blink and relation to looking at it and i am trying to find the light that may be there, candles and the darkness. how has your own politics evolved to evoke you from the early 1970s, you are definitely a man who believed in socialism as the way out of chile's inequalities and injustice. latin america has tried socialism in different forms from castro, to chavez to morales, all sorts of brands of it, you went to live in the country that back in the early �*70s, you despised, the united states. you wrote books telling the world how evil american imperialism was and you ended up living there. i'm just wondering, what has happened to your politics of the last 30 years. first of all, i was a democratic socialist, and i was never for a dictatorship. i thought to reach socialism, you need more democracy, not less. and i've been very clear about that always and that was important about the experiment

was that it was not an experiment in which we were going to kill our adversaries or silence them. in fact, they ended up killing us and silencing us. but the meditation that i have come to understand is, first of all, there is a need for profound and radical change in the ways in which we structured the economy, our social life, the inequalities, right. that is one of the things that is feeding the problems of the world today. the globalisation has brought many benefits and has brought many problems as well. the pandemic has shown in a startling relief, all the problems that the health system has, poverty, it is there, right? so i believe in radical change. i believe radical change happens through revolutions that are gentle, that may be disruptive, certainly, and may be threatening at times

to people, but they should be organised in such a way that we create more democracy and not less. i have evolved in that sense, certainly. and i would be a fool if i had not evolved and have not learned a lesson. what i'm trying to do is, i don't want the fact that we were defeated such drastic leads are terribly and the pain we endured was so great that i become conservative and i say to myself, "ok, you know what was make no need for change whatsoever. every time you try to change, there's going to be disappeared people, they're going to kill people, hurt people. and i think that is the road to destruction. we need to change radically the way in which we structure our lives and our psychological lives as well as our economic lives. that will take a long time to happen. i'm not saying it's going to happen, but there are forces for change in the road today is a as forces for despotism. it is very difficult situation because i feel that the amount of fake news and fraudulence

and the lack of a common agreement on what the truth is. let me end by inviting you to weave together your in the santiago early �*70s to your present. you have written in recent years, about your deep concerns that america and its democracy are profoundly fragile in a way that reminds you of chile in the 1970s. how far would you take that analogy? i think i take it quite far in fact because i think that chile today has a lesson for the united states. we managed to create a situation today in chile where we are discussing a new constitution. meaning we are discussing a new constitution, which is the first time the people of chile have discussed the new constitution that has not been imposed upon them. this is the first time in our history that we have been able

to take the dreams of what we want the country to be and turn that into laws, into legislation, into a magna carta. and i think the united states need something similar. but you cannot do that unless you look deeply into your own innocence or your own sense that you are responsible for this. and i think the united states is in a terrible moment, a very difficult moment because of trump is him. —— a very difficult moment because of trumpism. but donald trump is just a symptom of something very deep malaise and sickness inside american society. to sum up and go back into the beginning. you are really sure, are you, that the good in us and the love in us can really trump the bad, the cruel in the inhuman? i am not sure of that at all, but the whole point if i was sure about that, i would be some prophit or something. i am wagering that that is the way out. and i'm saying there is enough good to give me some hope.

it is not a done deal. 0n the contrary, the odds, i would say the odds are against us, but never bet against lovers. that is a great way to end. ariel dorfman thank you very much for joining me on hardtalk. thank you so much for having me. hello there. after a day of sunshine and showers on monday, the weather on tuesday is going to look very different, and here's why. this cloud here in the atlantic is pushing in from the west, and that's bringing with it some outbreaks of rain. ahead of that, though, with some clearer skies, it will be a bit cooler across eastern scotland and eastern parts of england.

but out to the west, it's milder to start the day with this rain around. some quite heavy rain, too. that rain shouldn't last too long. in northern ireland, we'll see a a spell of rain pushing eastwards through the morning across scotland and northern england, but the rain further south tends to become light and patchy. most of that rain will have cleared in the afternoon, leaving some drizzle around some western hills, but to the east of high ground, perhaps some sunshine, many places becoming dry in the afternoon. strong south—westerly winds, very mild day — temperatures widely16—17 celsius, quite a bit warmer than it was on monday for the northern half of the uk. but there's still some rain in the far northwest. that's on that weather front there, and that is going to move its way southwards overnight and into wednesday. it's going to hang around across some different parts of the uk during the day. all the while, though, we're pulling in air from a long way south, which is why it's so mild for late october. but there's some rain around, which is going to be quite heavy over some of the hills. that rain mainly affecting north wales, northwest england, could push back into parts

of northern ireland, more especially into southern scotland. to the northwest, there will be some sunshine for a while and some showers, and to the south of our rain band, it should be brightening up. a little bit of sunshine coming through, still quite windy, but very mild. temperatures getting up to 18 celsius. now, looking at the rain fall accumulation during wednesday and thursday, i want to highlight the areas that will see the heaviest of the rain. these are these bright colours here. it looks like it's going to be particularly wet in the southern uplands, but also into cumbria, and that could lead to some flooding. because that rain is still around on thursday, it may turn a bit drier across some northwestern parts of scotland and also northern ireland, as the rain just pivots into more of england and wales. through the midlands and much of eastern england, it's likely to still be dry, and with a bit of sunshine, those temperatures again reaching 18 celsius. so, a lot going on over the next few days or so. it's going to be quite windy. the winds, though, are going to be in from the southwest, which is why it's going to be so mild, but as we've seen, there will be some rain around, mainly for the western side of the uk, and that will be heavy in the hills.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines. the un warns of a �*countdown to catastrophy�* in afghanistan — with half the country going hungry and millions of people facing starvation. people are desperate — this little girl has been sold by her parents, so the family can buy food. we know there are other families who sold their children and even while we have been here another person came up been here another person came up to one of our team and asked if we would like to buy their child. the desperation and the urgency of the situation is hard to put in words. new covid rules are coming soon for travellers to the us —

most will need proof of vaccination — but bans