the un has warned of a �*countdown to catastrophe,�* in afghanistan with millions facing starvation. hospitals are already seeing increased levels of malnutrition. aid agencies say the situation has deteriorated sharply, since the taliban seized power in august. some families have become so desparate for money, they've sold their children. one of the world's most criticised polluters, australia, has formally adopted a net zero emissions target by 2050. theyjoin dozens of other countries around the world with a similar stated aim. the commitement comes less than a week ahead of the cop26 global climate change summit. the united states has suspended a $700 million aid package to sudan after a military coup.

now on bbc news, it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. welcome to hardtalk i'm stephen sackur. in all cultures, all languages, there are writers whose imaginations prompt them to challenge the status quo. in democracies, they're called critical voices. in authoritarian regimes, they're labelled enemies of the state. my guest today, the 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 but his 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. your latest book, the compensation bureau, 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's where you believe we human beings are right now? i think we are in danger of apocalypse certainly from climate change, pestilence and especially from nuclear warfare

which i think is going to be easier to come by because of the climate change that is coming. you know, wars for water, wars for land, wars for resources. but the novel is apocalyptic only towards the end, really. it began in a very, very different way as a, i don't know whether i should just describe a little bit about what it's about so that we understand where it's going towards, why ends towards apocalypse? a lot of people around the world are watching and listening who will be intrigued and who obviously won't have read the book. so, very briefly, give a sense what kind of world you have created. briefly, i imagine, being an atheist myself, i imagine a universe which is governed from the 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 of the dna which brings these people — us, of course, towards warlike consistent violence over and over again. and she conceives of 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 conceives a compesation bureau which will take every human being who has been unfairly killed or suffered and giving them a second chance, a virtual theatre of life, give them a second chance to live out the life they didn't live. and this will have all sorts of consequences. and one of the consequences that comes towards the end is the revelation, the apocalypse is coming, that none of this is helped at all to end this warlike quality that we suffer. it is, ariel dorfman, it is pretty bleak, you have to admit.

and what i findfascinating about it, in so much of your work, you are 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 in 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? 0h, love! love is going to triumph, finally. is it? 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 recreate a thousand lives,

falls in love with one woman in particular. and decides to go outside the rules and give her over and over again, because he is so in love with her, it is a voyeuristic fantasy that the woman he can't touch, he can't even live with her, he gives her the wonderful life that he 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 do with that sense that his love for her will end up having a great effect upon how humanity might possibly save itself from this apocalypse. i do not want to give away the ending. we will get back to love later, but what i want to drill down to is this capacity you have and it is evoked in the book, for seeing things from the outside, i mean, here, the central character is an overseer, an actuary who looks down at earth from the outside. but it strikes me that

in your own life, you have been something of a detached outsider in the society that you lived in for various, for 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 all my life what i've tried to do is be inside, belong, dance with the others, be a part of a group, be accepted and then i realised, especially during some of the 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'm notjust 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 and films or my poems, how they can go into that world with me and yet, save a certain sense of not being overwhelmed by the world itself. do you think it brings you a greater clarity of vision 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 spent a lot of time in chile and in the spanish—speaking world. does the life you live now,

does he give you a greater clarity of vision, do you think? i hope so. i think it is a certain clarity concerning possibilities and i see myself as a bridge between different worlds. the world is made of overlapping communities they belong to many different overlapping communities. the question is, this pluralism that we believe in democracy and society, you, me not accepted also in our own selves that we have many selves inside ourselves this meant that we are many people and we have many faces and many masks and i feel like i'm a bridge between two languages 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 was 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 the lake, that is not what happened. what is interesting is that you talk about the life that you fled, and belonging in different places but in essence, 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 19905 and early 2000s 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 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 burgertold 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. i do have roots in my past

and my home is my wife of 56 years we have been married and it's my family, my friends. it is the memories that i've got, it is the sense of struggle. 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 between despair and that idea that we can do better and at the same time, iam not a preacher, iam not 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, 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 like people to participate in that. 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 sense 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. in 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 rhetorical english, my eloquence, but i botched it. but the point is, if english is inhabited by the spanish and the spanish has residence inside itself of english. when i am writing, there is a fusion of both in one person. i am a strange character. briefly, i want to talk about two seminal moments.

the first when you are a very small child, 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 was rushing 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. when i left 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 refused to speak it. i said i'm not speaking this language any more

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 it felt abandoned by my parents and its had other effects, i always try to please everybody but 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 and there's that aspect to your character. and i did lose everything over and over again. 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 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 all of the supporters of that government because the military

move in and take over, 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 that 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 save 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 also the sense that if i survive, it was to tell the story. it was so that someone could tell us the story. and i 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, but to those traumatic situations teach us about forgiveness, revolution, about change,

but gentleness and about love? and i fret constantly to create that and the bureau is one more step in the question of what do we do with the victims was, what do we do with the perpetrators? what do we do with the trees that are the victims of the perpetrators? what about the world that is in such pain and how do we assuage that pain? and we feel it, if we find a way of fuming 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 as the player wrote as a woman torture victim is brought face—to—face with her torturer. 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 not just about chile, it's about dictatorship

and it's about cruelty, inhumanity in many different corners of the world at 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 believe 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. but ordinary people do terrible things. we have to create a situation that really asks the audience to look at themselves in the mirror and say, what can i do?

how am i complacent in the system? can i change the 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 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 have journalists 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 books but the 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 19705, 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 and 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. i was a democratic socialist and i was never for a dictatorship.

i thought to reach socialism, through democracy, 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 a startling relief, all the problems that the health system has of 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 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 and 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, you know what, 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. the best thing is to just leave things as they are to 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 and i might say it's going to happen, but there are forces for change in the world 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. inviting you to weave together your past in the santiago early �*70s in 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 19705. 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 that we are discussing a new constitution. 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. it is the first time in our

history that we have been able to take 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. 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 trumpism. but donald trump is just a symptom of something very deep malaise and sickness in5ide american society. to go back into the beginning. you are really sure 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 profit 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 see the odds are against us, but never bet against lover5. 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'll 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 with some quite heavy rain too. that rain shouldn't last too long in northern ireland. we will see 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 and 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 16, 17 degrees. a bit warmer than it was on monday for the northern half of the uk. but there's still some rain in the far north—west, that's on that front there. that is going to move its way southwards overnight and into wednesday. it's going to hang around across different parts of the uk during the day. all the while though, we are pulling in air from a long way south which is quite so mild for late october. but there is some rain around which is going to be quite heavy over some of the hills. that rain mainly affecting north wales,

north—west england. could push back into parts of northern ireland and more especially into southern scotland. to the north—west 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 rainfall accumulation during wednesday and thursday i want to highlight the areas that will see the heaviest of the rain. this is the bright colours here and 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 north—western parts of scotland and also northern ireland as the rainjust pivots more into england and wales. but 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 and the winds will be from the south—west, 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 would be heavy in the hills.

this is bbc news — i'm samantha simmonds with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. australia is one of the world's most criticised polluters — but now the government pledges to reach net zero emissions by 2050. with the countdowm to cop—26 in glasgow, sir david attenborough warns leaders in the developed world to act on climate change now — or it ll be too late. we caused it. our kind of industrialisation is one of the major factors industrialisation is one of the majorfactors in producing this changing climate. we have a moral responsibility even if we didn't cause it. the bbc confirms the parents of the manchester bomber — salman abedi — are still living in the libyan capital, — where they�* re under surveillance.

and: the fairytale royal wedding injapan — but the couple