THE LAST BOHEMIANS

The award-winning podcast series that meets maverick women in arts and culture returns with a

special episode that meets the late great poet Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024)

“These, some of the coolest women of our time, are true trailblazers whose stories will shock, impress and charm you all at once”  Refinery29

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April 4 11, 2025 (London, UK) — The Last Bohemians is the award-winning, critically-acclaimed podcast that meets maverick women in arts and culture – from club mavens and psychedelic activists to erotic novelists and style icons – taking listeners on a vivid, hallucinatory trip through their extraordinary lives. The series asks listeners to consider the legacies of women who've existed outside of the roles that society had carved out for them.

Across over 30 episodes, host and creator Kate Hutchinson (The Guardian/The New York Times) has met the likes of performance artist Marina Abramović, painter and queer icon Maggi Hambling, fashion designers Zandra Rhodes and Michéle Lamy, musicians Cosey Fanni Tutti, PP Arnold and Judy Collins, forgotten 1970s witch Maxine Sanders, Bond Girl Gloria Hendry, artists Penny Slinger and Betye Saar and many more.

It has been a podcast of the week in the Guardian, The Financial Times, NME and on BBC Radio 4, and championed by The New Yorker, Frieze, Dazed and BBC. These are intimate audio portraits that show, said the New Yorker, how “we’re all works in progress, up to the very last moment.”

For 2025, The Last Bohemians

returns with a new Substack

and new episode starring the late
Nikki Giovanni.

Giovanni was born in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, grew up in Ohio, and self-published her first two books in 1968. In the ‘70s, she was selling out huge concert venues and started blending gospel music with spoken word, on albums like Truth is On The Way, foreshadowing the birth of hip-hop. Her poems spoke boldly of justice and liberation but had love and joy at their center, and she released over 30 books of them.

A poet, author and activist, Giovanni was considered a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included notable writers and artists like Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou and another of the Last Bohemians’ guests, Betye Saar, many of whom Giovanni counted as friends.

Says Kate Hutchinson:

“Nikki Giovanni was one of the greatest poets of her generation and it was an honour to sit with her for a special episode of The Last Bohemians, recorded in Spring 2024 in London, while she was promoting what would become her final anthology, Poems: 1968-2020 (Penguin Classics). When we saw she was in town, we jumped at the chance to speak with her and we're very grateful to have been granted an audience.

It’s strange and sad to speak about Nikki Giovanni in the past tense: she passed away on 9 December 2024, aged 81, of complications from lung cancer, just before this edit was finished.

We’d sat on this episode for a while, unsure what to do with it and when to release it, but with everything going on in the world at the moment, it was time to send this special conversation out there in tribute to Nikki's questing and fearless spirit.

And wow, does Nikki have some things to say, as she discusses becoming a success, her famous friendships with Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, the power of anger, her self-care routine, her concern for the future of America and why poetry is a serious business.

The Last Bohemians is available

on all the usual podcast platforms,

including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

thelastbohemians.substack.com

Kate is currently working on a major new audio series about music producers, engineers and composers, which launches on 15 April. For more details and to get on the press list,
email jodie@staygoldenpr.com.

ABOUT THE LAST BOHEMIANS

In a world of celebrity interview podcasts, The Last Bohemians stands apart. Its exceptional audio quality and expert storytelling showcases inspiring lives like no other, offering moments of escapism and positivity with a hefty side of attitude. “Listen and feel exhilarated,” said one fan, while one critic noted how the sound design “elevated the form” of the interview podcast.

The Last Bohemians is made by an all-women and non-binary team, giving rising audio stars a new platform to get creative and break boundaries. Journalist and broadcaster Kate Hutchinson launched The Last Bohemians in 2019, pairing the audio with stunning portraits by photographer Laura Kelly. It stole hearts with 86-year-old Molly Parkin’s stories of self-pleasuring, LSD countess Amanda Feilding’s trepanning tales and Pamela Des Barres’ reflections on supergroupiedom. It won silver for Best New Podcast at the 2020 British Podcast Awards and was a finalist at the 2021 Audio Production Awards.

Series two featured folk legend Judy Collins on getting tattooed with Anthony Bourdain’s mum and still gigging hard at 80; British fashion icon Zandra Rhodes, dealing with the aftermath of losing her lover while celebrating 50 years in fashion; anarcho-punk innovator and illustrator Gee Vaucher at home at her ‘open-house’ commune in Essex; and the controversial witch at the heart of the 1970s occult boom, Maxine Sanders.

In 2021, The Last Bohemians launched a lockdown special with none other than performance artist Marina Abramović; it returned in 2022 with the UK’s greatest living painter, Maggi Hambling, as well as Bowie’s former best friend Dana Gillespie and theatre actor and best friend of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, Cleo Sylvestre, and in 2023 with a special Los Angeles-set series starring Angelyne, Linda Ramone, Johanna Went, Gloria Hendry and more.

ABOUT KATE HUTCHINSON

Kate Hutchinson a new force to be reckoned with in independent media. She is a leading UK music journalist, broadcaster and podcast creator and a regular contributor to the Guardian. Her work has also appeared in the Observer New Review, The Sunday Times, The Wire, i-D, Vice, Mixmag, Dazed, Disco Pogo and Songlines, as well as on several front pages of The New York Times.

A forward-thinking curator and DJ, Kate presented the inaugural ‘Club Ono’ at Tate Modern to celebrate the gallery’s Yoko Ono retrospective, which she then took to Glastonbury’s Park Stage in 2024 alongside the musician BISHI. She has written pieces for books about Daft Punk and  Aphex Twin and is featured in the 2024 Faber book Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story of UK Jazz.

PRAISE FOR THE LAST BOHEMIANS

“This series is a delight… Run to this podcast right now”  The Observer

  "Unusually intimate portraits of spectacular lives… Buoyed by exquisite production, these conversations are atmospheric, contemplative and fabulously candid" Financial Times

"A beautifully intimate set of portraits made by an all-female audio team" The Guardian

Feisty, heartfelt and bursting with wisdom" NME

"A rhapsodic, necessary retelling of trailblazer stories" Dazed Digital

“The guests are so unguarded that the episodes possess that longed-for bite” –
The Spectator

Visit The Last Bohemians online:

thelastbohemians.substack.com

spotify.com/show/7o6ZrN9PBPLrH56KOpaXnF

itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-last-bohemians/id1453507847

instagram.com/thelastbohemianspod

Photo of Nikki Giovanni courtesy of The Last Bohemians.

To request additional press materials,

please email flypr@flypr.net, or buzz@flypr.net

or call T. 323-667-1344 in North America.

For the UK and the rest of the world

please contact Jodie@staygoldenpr.com.

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