The story of food blogger and poverty campaigner Jack Monroe will be turned into a five-part Radio 4 drama starring Jaime Winstone and June Whitfield.



Winstone will star as Monroe, who rose to fame with a blog about cooking healthy meals while living on the breadline, with Absolutely Fabulous star Whitfield playing her grandmother.

The series will be based on Monroe’s bestselling book, A Girl Called Jack, and adapted by writer Sarah Daniels for broadcast next month.

Monroe revealed they were transgender in October this year, requesting that media outlets use the pronouns them/they.

It was part of a new season of Radio 4 programmes announced on Thursday including a homegrown spin-off of From Our Own Correspondent with Mishal Husain, a four-part series with Lenny Henry and a new adaptation of Look Back in Anger starring Sir Ian McKellen and David Tennant.

McKellen and Tennant will star in a new version of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, directed by Richard Wilson, which will air next month, 60 years after the play’s debut in 1956.

Its cast also includes Nancy Carroll, Daniel Evans and Claire Price, and will be accompanied by an episode of Archive on 4 in which Tennant will look at the controversy sparked by the original production.

Radio 4 also announced a new dramatisation of Primo Levi’s short story collection The Periodic Table, starring Henry Goodman and introduced by Janet Suzman, to be broadcast in 12 episodes of varying lengths this spring.

Today presenter Husain will front From Our Home Correspondent, which will air in a regular monthly Sunday lunchtime slot beginning on 3 May.

Lenny Henry will front Rogue’s Gallery, a four-part series of “darkly comic, genre bending monologues” in which a different character will tell their story “each with a sting in the tale”. It will be broadcast in May.

Other new Radio 4 series include The Global Philosopher with Michael Sandel, and Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech.