BBC World Service: Only Bleeding

Luna Silva invites us to a traditional Georgian Supra, where food, wine and polyphonic singing blend together.

This programme won a Special Commendation at Europe's most prestigious audio awards the Prix Europa, in 2025.

The judges called it 'joyous and beautifully crafted' and 'an unforgettable, immersive, and enriching listen'.

Click here to listen.

Sweden's fight for gender-neutral personal pronoun ‘hen’. Maddy Savage speaks with Nasim Aghili from the queer art collective Ful, for the BBC World Service 'Witness History' strand. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct3c3l

In the summer of 1978, many Swedish workers relished the chance to take longer, paid vacations than ever before.This was thanks to an update to Sweden’s Annual Leave Act - or Semesterlagen in Swedish - passed the previous year.

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The law guaranteed all employees four consecutive weeks of vacation, and increased their total annual leave to five weeks, giving them some of the longest paid holidays in the world.These policies transformed the way Swedes do business. Many factories and offices shut down for an entire month during the summer. Today,Sweden retains its strong reputation for work-life balance, and the annual leave act has given rise to the 'sommar jobb' - short summer jobs that help cover holiday absences.

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(Photo: Inga Persson. Credit: Inga Persson)

Producer: Maddy Savage

A Bespoken Media production for BBC World Service.

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A linguistic collage of modern Scotland, from Multitrack Audio Fellow Stephen Maguire. Listen here.