Mason Currey: Making Art and Making a Living

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Mason Currey, author of the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life . He tells me how artists, writers and composers have wrangled through history with the challenge of scraping by, and how that has affected their art, from Baudelaire's lifelong outrage at being forced to live on an allowance and John Berryman's disastrous stint as a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman to Haydn reinventing the musical idiom of his time because he was so far in the boondocks with his day job that he didn't know what the musical idiom of his time was, exactly. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more. For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts Contact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Mason Currey: Making Art and Making a Living is an episode from Spectator Books by The Spectator.

This episode is 41:33 long.

This episode was published on Apr 8, 2026.

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