Jessie Levene

My Chinatown Food Tour is featured in a new e-book, ‘Kiratiana’s Travel Guide to Multicultural London’, by American writer and journalist Kiratiana Freelon. Kiratiana found me via Google and a few months ago we sat down to an epic Skype conversation, some of which you can read in this blog post; my deepest thanks to Kiratiana for including me in her book.

If you’d like a food tour of London’s Chinatown, please email me at jessielevene AT gmail DOT com.

Two conversations that I recently co-edited for the BBC Radio 4 series The Listening Project are now available to listen to online. The first, ‘Reluctant retirement’, which was also broadcast on the Radio 4 programme, is an intimate conversation between sisters Lynn and Anna about Lynn’s recent, difficult decision to retire from her job as a primary school deputy head. It was recorded and submitted by my comrade in radio freelance-land (and Lynn’s daughter) Kirsty McQuire.

The second, ‘Life changing decision’, is a beautiful, emotional conversation between Janette and her daughter Helen, about the events that led to Helen entirely losing her hearing at the age of 19 months.

If you’d like to record a conversation and be part of The Listening Project, please click here.

I am contributing three short segments to the marvellous new Shambala Festival Podcast, produced by the lovely and very talented lady that is Mair Bosworth. It was a very happy moment early this summer when I got an email from Mair asking if I wanted to be a ‘roving food reporter’ at Shambala in August. I certainly did, and the weekend kicked off brilliantly with my following the arrival of the Sustrans-led bike rides to the festival on the Thursday afternoon. You can hear all about that in the first Shambala podcast (my bit starts at about 1’15″), as well as the stag do who dressed up as Tories, some fabulous music, and this woman.

In the second edition, you can hear my segment (starting at about 4’50″) about a wonderful wild food walk led by the legendary Mike Feingold, sample some beautiful music from the marvellous Hannah Williams & The Tastemakers, and have a chuckle at the infamous Shambala Cock Drawing Club.

My radio production showreel for 2012. A mixture of work produced for BBC Radio 4, NPR, Making Contact and also for my MA at Goldsmiths.

The latest edition of BBC Radio 4 series Short Cuts (made by the wonderful Falling Tree Productions) features a piece that I produced, about a woman who gave her daughter the surname ‘Wild’. It’s available to listen to on iPlayer until Tuesday 9th October.

With my Radio MA complete I have now entered the (slightly scary) world of freelancing.

To kick things off, in September I recorded a simul-rec with writer, journalist and all-round nice person Caitlin Moran for weekly BBC Radio 4 programme Feedback, made by Whistledown Productions. The episode that my simul-rec was used in is unfortunately no longer available to listen to online, but I was told by the programme’s Executive Producer that, and I quote, “it’s the best recorded simul-rec that I’ve heard in 20 years” !

And as if that wasn’t enough excitement for one month, I also recently produced a feature for the second series of Short Cuts, the fabulous programme of creative radio documentaries made by Falling Tree Productions for BBC Radio 4. Back in January when I was still a student I was lucky enough to have my work featured in the first series of Short Cuts; my piece for the new series is an interview with a woman who gave her daughter the surname ‘Wild’, and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 3pm on Tuesday 2nd October.

World Brunch Club, the pop-up restaurant co-chefed by myself and Francesca Ter-Berg, was featured recently on The Menu, the weekly food show from internet radio station Monocle 24. Our slot in in Episode 39, starts at 32’10″, and you can find it here.

For the latest edition of US-based radio programme Making Contact, I produced a segment about the policing of London 2012. Featuring the voices of playwright Dominic Taylor, Newham Monitoring Project‘s Estelle du Boulay and many others, you can hear it as part of the whole programme, or listen to the segment individually via Soundcloud.

This is the 15-minute feature that I produced for the Creative Radio strand of my MA programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Marcel Proust’s novel ‘In Search of Lost Time’ famously describes a universal experience – that involuntary rush of memory when we eat or drink a certain thing. For the narrator of that novel it was a Madeleine cake, and in this documentary we hear from a psychologist, a food writer and two young women as they explore the phenomenon of the Madeleine Moment.

Many thanks to Hatt Reiss, Sarah Giaziri, Simon Parkes and John Morton for talking to me about food, memory and everything in between.

I recorded the London side of this interview with The Guardian’s Michael White about the upcoming Royal Jubilee for NPR’s flagship news programme All Things Considered.