Chaucer in 2014: Patience Agbabi and Lavinia Greenlaw's fresh takes - Edinburgh books podcast

Agbabi updates the Canterbury Tales with contemporary characters, and Greenlaw reinvents the poetry of Troilus and Criseyde

Listen to more of our daily festival podcasts

Why do some poets survive when others don't? As two reworkings of Chaucer come to the Edinburgh international book festival, we talk to the writers who have refashioned them.

Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales is a 21st-century remix of The Canterbury Tales, which transforms Chaucer's bawdy into a portrait of multicultural London that takes in chancers, crooks and grime musicians. Lavinia Greenlaw's A Double Sorrow reframes Troilus and Criseyde into a sequence of more than 200 seven-line poems recounting the tragic romance of the Trojan hero and his lover.

Reading list:
A Double Sorrow by Lavinia Greenlaw (Faber)
Telling Tales by Patience Agbabi (Canongate)