Six BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of Maya Angelou’s evocative, extraordinary memoirs, starring Adjoa Andoh and Pippa Bennett-Warner

The books that make up the life and times of Maya Angelou are among the most beautiful and haunting bits of autobiography ever written. Joyous, immediate and searingly honest, they have huge variations from life-affirming to tragic, and again.

I Know So why the Caged Bird Sings graphs Maya’s childhood in the Deep South in the 1930s; while Gather Together IN MY OWN Name recounts about The Maya Angelou Autobiographies: Six BBC Radio 4 dramatisations her descent into prostitution and narcotics. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas views her forging a career in showbusiness, and in The Center of a female, she moves to NY and becomes involved with civil privileges. All God’s Kids Need Travelling Shoes explores her time in Ghana during the 1960s, and in A Track Flung up to Heaven, she returns to America to utilize Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. When tragedy hits, her friend Adam Baldwin assists her out of her devastation – and new possibilities beckon for Maya.

Angelou’s memoirs have become modern classics, beloved worldwide, and these stunning dramatisations illuminate her incredible resilience, creativity and power, painting an extraordinary portrait of 20th century black America.