Our guest today is the author of one of the most lauded books of 2021, the superb Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. One of the awards it garnered last year was the highly prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and one of the judges on the panel last year was our own Dr Helen Czerski, so this week we’ve handed over the solo reigns of the podcast to Helen. She talks to Patrick about the book, the research, the threats, legal and beyond and how the Sacklers are an example of an entirely broken system.

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Photograph by Lars van der Brink

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