Val McDermid, Jane Rogers, John Gallas, Nicola Davies

Ian McMillan explores how writers make use of children's voices - with guests Val McDermid, John Gallas, Nicola Davies and Jane Rogers.

Val McDermid explores our fascination with the language of The Leveson Inquiry, in particular the phrase 'country supper'. She explains why it evokes for her, not the Chipping Norton set, but the world of Beatrix Potter - the tantalising glimpses of 'other peoples food' that children come across in stories.

John Gallas shares the creative process which led him to invent a twelve year old boy who wants to escape his own life, and the demands of 'evolution' in his new poetry collection 'Fresh Air and The Story of Molecule' (Carcanet)

Nicola Davies introduces 'A First Book of Nature' - in which she celebrates those first, important experiences of the natural world for young readers (Walker Books)

And Jane Rogers employs the voices of young people in different ways in her writing - here she reads from a new short story 'Morphogenesis' (Comma Press) in which she imagines the consciousness of the ten year old Alan Turing, and she also discusses the heroine of her novel 'The Testament of Jessie Lamb', which just won the Arthur C Clarke award for the best science fiction book published in 2012 (Canongate).