Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

Radio 4,27 Jul 2026,57 mins

Women and prison, Abuse in swinging, Fiction and murdered women, Cyclist Lizzie Deignan

Woman's Hour

Available for over a year

The new Reform police and crime commissioner for Norfolk, former detective Colin Sutton, has said that releasing women from prison ‘would be a kind of a radical, outside-the-box way of creating more prison space’. He joins Nuala McGovern along with Andrea Coomber, the chief executive of The Howard League for Penal Reform. We follow up with BBC Journalist Catrin Nye whose podcast, Swingers, highlighted the story of Ruth, a woman who said she had been pressured into having sex with over 100 strangers. Since its release, 50 women have come forward with their own stories. Catrin tells us the latest. Author Wendy Jones recently observed that seven of the top ten fiction paperback novels on the Sunday Times bestsellers list featured a woman who had been murdered. Nuala talks to authors Saima Mir and Lesley McEvoy about why dead women are a central theme in fiction, and why those books are so popular. A new cycling app "Sofa to Saddle" wants to get one million more Brits peddling by 2028. Olympian and world medallist cyclist Lizzie Deignan and Cicely Lloyd, from Brighton’s Multicultural Women’s Cycle Club, discuss how the barriers to more women cycling can be overcome. Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Melanie Abbott

Programme Website
More episodes