Legacy

Content warning: this episode includes discussion of war, killing and the ongoing violence in Gaza.

Why did a cactus in an empty Palestinian village become the start of a novel?

What happens when the ghost of a girl killed in 1967 asks a teenager from North London for help?

And, why did Amy's tutor tell her, aged 20, to choose another cause?

Peter and Afua talk to novelist Amy Abdelnoor about her debut, Ever Land.

Amy volunteered in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and lived in Ramallah during the Second Intifada. Ever Land follows two girls. Safa is a Palestinian girl killed in the 1967 Six-Day War, who can't move on until she finds her little sister. Dinah is a Jewish teenager from London who moves to Israel decades later. Amy talks about the cactus plants that still mark emptied villages, why she chose fiction over non-fiction, the email that told her there are "two sides to every story", writing grief, and her Lebanese grandfather.

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00:00 Introduction
03:07 What Ever Land is about
03:56 Why a ghost? The cactus in the empty village
08:25 Why fiction, not history
11:16 "Two sides to every story"
15:30 Writing as the world changed
20:46 Writing grief
24:05 Ghosts in the landscape
27:31 Is Safa every ghost?
30:30 Amy's Lebanese roots
33:40 "Choose another cause"

Stay connected with Legacy:
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Content warning: this episode includes violence, drug addiction and references to sexual abuse.

How did a pregnant Black Panther with no legal training defend herself against 156 charges, and win?

Why did she name her son after the last Inca ruler, executed in Cusco in 1572?

And, how did a ballet-dancing theatre kid become the rapper a US vice president said should never have been released?

In the first of four episodes, Peter and Afua begin the story of Tupac Shakur.

Thirty years after the shooting in Las Vegas, a jury has finally reached a verdict. But Tupac's story begins much earlier, in a Manhattan courtroom in 1971. His mother, Afeni Shakur, is on trial as one of the Panther 21. She is pregnant, she has sacked her lawyer, and she is facing life in prison. Peter and Afua follow her from North Carolina to the Black Panthers, and through the FBI's war on the movement. Then they follow her son. He grows up through New York, Baltimore and Marin City, and the episode ends with his first album.

Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more. In this series, members also get bonus interviews with a former member of Tupac's crew and a filmmaker.
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00:00 Las Vegas, 30 years on
03:26 Afeni Shakur joins the Panthers
06:34 Hoover, COINTELPRO and the Panther 21
10:46 Pregnant in jail
11:39 Afeni defends herself
15:23 Why "Tupac"?
20:47 A revolutionary family
24:11 Baltimore and the School for the Arts
29:46 Marin City
32:36 "Same Song" and the first album

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What were British soldiers doing in Palestine in 1945, between the oranges, the swimming and the bombs?

Why does the Christmas show in Sebastian Faulks's Jerusalem swap Gilbert and Sullivan for Oscar Wilde?

And, how did a novelist who plans everything end up with a twist he never saw coming?

Sebastian Faulks tells Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch how his father's posting, hundreds of hours of soldiers' memories and a much-missed friend became his new novel, Farewell to Eden.

His father was sent from Italy in late 1945 for what the army called "rest and peacekeeping", and was there when the King David Hotel was bombed. Sebastian built the book from the Imperial War Museum's sound archive, a 1949 diary kept by the Uruguayan member of the UN committee that drew the borders, and the memory of his closest friend, the Guardian's Middle East editor Ian Black, who first explained it all to him in their first week at Cambridge. Plus Amos Oz's grandparents, who thought Palestine was "too Asian", a padre's vision on Easter Saturday, the grey "tundra" of post-war Britain, and why Sebastian had to unlearn the idea that happy endings are vulgar.

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[0:00] Oranges, sunshine and a storm coming
[2:22] A boarding school, October 2023 and an old friend
[5:52] His father's "rest and peacekeeping" in 1945
[15:17] The Irgun, a bombing in Rome and no easy sides
[18:53] Faith in the Holy Land, and a Christmas show in Jerusalem
[24:51] The twist even he didn't plan
[26:56] How grim post-war Britain really was
[29:43] Why happy endings aren't vulgar
[33:04] Crosswords, coffee and 1,000 words a day
[38:14] A diary from 1949 and the UN's impossible job

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Come and join us live! On Monday 16 November, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch will be on stage at Kings Place in London with the wonderful Elif Shafak.

Her extraordinary new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, tells the story of Gustave Flaubert, the creator of Madame Bovary, through the eyes of the women whose lives shaped his, and whose stories have largely been forgotten. It's about who gets to tell history, whose voices are silenced, and why literature matters, especially in times of turmoil.

The book comes out the day before, so this is a rare chance to hear Elif talk about it, and about history and memory, with us.

Tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/legacy-live-elif-shafak-in-conversation-with-afua-hirsch-peter-frankopan-tickets-2003929321545
Or through the Kings Place box office.

More Legacy Live events are on the way in late 2026 and 2027. To hear about them first, join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What did a run of terrible Caribbean hurricanes have to do with American independence?

How did a volcano in Indonesia help give us Frankenstein?

And, why were so many of the people fighting for civil rights also fighting for the planet?

In the next part of The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow the storms, eruptions and campaigners that changed the course of history.

Why Europeans didn't just build their plantations in West Africa, and how mosquitoes helped draw the line between America's North and South. Hurricane-wrecked islands desperate for food, rope and wood, and American merchants furious that London decided who they could sell to. Then the year without a summer: Mary Shelley's rain-soaked holiday at Lake Geneva, soldiers home from the Napoleonic Wars with no work, and the massacre at Peterloo. Plus a jumbo jet that flew into volcanic ash, Frankenstein at Cold War disarmament talks, and why Coretta Scott King, Rachel Carson and Greta Thunberg belong in the same story.

Join Legacy Plus for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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[0:00] Hurricanes, volcanoes and the women who fought for the planet
[1:49] Founding mothers, and history without the weather
[3:34] Why not build plantations in West Africa?
[9:29] The hurricanes behind American independence
[13:07] Frankenstein and a gothic childhood
[14:22] Mount Tambora and the year without a summer
[18:02] A jumbo jet, an ash cloud and nuclear winter
[23:38] Civil rights and the climate
[26:55] Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
[27:57] Why women led the fight

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.