Lives Less Ordinary

How Ustad Noor Bakhsh, a Pakistani shepherd in his 70s, became a folk music starAfter hunting for four years, Pakistani ethnomusicologist Daniyal Ahmed finally finds Ustad Noor Bakhsh, an elderly shepherd and master of the electric benjo – an obscure stringed instrument with typewriter keys. With Daniyal’s help, Ustad Noor would go from serenading his goats in the jungles of Ba

The epic quest to find an elderly Pakistani musician and his unusual stringed instrumentDaniyal Ahmed is a flute player and anthropologist who spends his time searching out and documenting folk music across Pakistan. In 2018, he was mesmerised by a video clip of an elderly man – described as a “poor fisherman” – expertly playing a benjo, an obscure stringed instrument that

Erika Cheung went from a trailer park to a top tech company job, but something was off.She knew how to work hard, growing up in a one-bedroom trailer, she dreamed of pursuing her passion for science and helping others. So Erika was thrilled to land her first job out of university at a booming tech company promising a revolution in healthcare. Fronted by the glamorous and wealthy El

A bonus episode from the Amazing Sport Stories podcast – The Black 14. Sport, racism and protests are about to change the lives of “the Black 14” American footballers. It’s 1969 in the United States. They’ve arrived on scholarships at the University of Wyoming to play for its Cowboys American football team. It was a predominantly white college. The team is treated like a

Maria's grandmother was forcibly taken by Australian officials, but made a daring escape.As children Maria Pilkington's mother and grandmother were both among the Stolen Generation, removed from their homes to be trained as domestic servants for white families. It was part of an Australian policy dating back to the 1930s to remove mixed-race children from any Aboriginal influence.

Leyner Palacios grew up around volatile armed groups, so he learned to negotiate with them.He comes from a remote forested area called Bojaya, where clusters of small villages are spread along isolated waterways. Leyner's community had to share the rivers and forests with outsiders, armed groups like the Farc and the paramilitaries, who were locked into a decades-old conflict. As a

The Austrian house where a doctor experimented on children.Evy Mages grew up in and out of foster care in 1970s and 80s Austria. But even when she started a new life in the US, she was haunted by traumatic memories of a strange yellow house high up in the Alps, where she had been placed as an eight-year-old. It took an idle internet search in her 50s to reveal that this was actuall

A handwritten map is all Mamadou Barry had to guide him from Guinea to Egypt.At the age of 24 he had reached a crossroads in his life. Having failed his final year secondary school exams five times in a row, he set his sights on a different type of education. Mamadou had heard about the prestigious Al Azhar University in Egypt, but could not afford a plane ticket. So he decided to

A life shaped by addiction.Australian Holly Deane-Johns had a complicated childhood. Her parents ran an escort agency from their home, and heroin addiction later took over the whole family. She was first given heroin by her mother, aged just 15. Holly ended up dealing to feed her habit, and in her early 30s was sentenced to 31 years in a notorious Thai prison, convicted of drug smu

Ruth Shaw spent years on ships and islands, trying to outrun her past.She left her home in New Zealand as a young woman, driven away by a traumatic attack that would shape her life for years to come. Ruth tried to find escape on sailing ships, in Tahitian gambling dens and in the bars and kitchens of Papua New Guinea. But ultimately she had to head home, to face up to deep adolesce