John Carlin.
This week, we were thrilled to have Un Tallat Amb… the journalist and author, John Carlin. From South Africa to Colombia, Central America to the US, and the UK to here in Catalunya, John has reported from seemingly everywhere around the world, bringing some of the most important stories of the 20th and 21st centuries to a global audience.
We talked to John about his views on the protests that were engulfing Barcelona at the time of recording, which veered into a conversation on the notion of referendums in the 21st century, as well as his thoughts on Brexit. We then chatted about the work for which John is probably most well known, which took place in South Africa when he was the bureau chief for the Independent in the 1990s, at the end of apartheid. During this time, he got to know Nelson Mandela “about as well as you could hope to know Mandela in your position as a humble journalist.” From this spawned a number of books: Knowing Mandela, Mandela and the General, and Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, the latter of which was made into the hugely successful film, Invictus.
A theme throughout his work is using sport as a lens through which to look at politics and global issues. It’s what Playing the Enemy was born from, and it’s cropped up elsewhere too. His book on Oscar Pistorius, Chase Your Shadow, is as much an exploration of post-Apartheid South Africa as it is a tale of the fall of a once “superhuman” athlete. His new TV series on Amazon, This is Football, is more of a celebration of the game, getting to the heart of what it is about the sport which makes it so universally loved across the globe. We talked about the show, the future of the game in the face of mega clubs and mega money, as well as what he thinks the future of journalism more generally looks like.
A funny, erudite, considered writer, we really enjoyed having John Carlin on the podcast, and we hope you enjoy our conversation.
You can look through John’s previous work through his website, here.
The music on this episode is “No Frills Cumbia” by Kevin MacLeod from https://filmmusic.io License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Harry Stott.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond.