Emma Barnett and Stacey Dooley

Award-winning broadcasters Emma Barnett and Stacey Dooley take a personal, political and cultural look at motherhood and the impact it has on women.

The pair’s honest and open conversation will look at the experience of becoming a mother and the physical and mental work required in motherhood, and celebrate mothers of all kinds.

Barnett’s new book Maternity Service was written in snatched moments after the birth of her second child, and is a heartfelt and reassuring look at what it really feels like to be on maternity leave, a period often viewed through rose-tinted glasses, which does a disservice to women and leaving them unprepared for the realities of the experience.

Barnett presents the BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme and hosts TV interviews and documentaries across the BBC. She was previously the chief host of Woman's Hour, the longest running women's programme in the world and a Newsnight presenter. Barnett writes a bi-weekly column for the I Paper and a Substack newsletter called Trying.

In Dear Minnie, written after she had her first child, Dooley brings her trademark empathy and investigative skill to an entirely new ‘frontline’, exploring the varied perspectives of mothers today. Using letters that each mother has written to their child as her starting point, Stacey’s frank, honest, and moving inquiry takes in experiences from pregnancy to birth and beyond.
Dooley has presented and produced over 100 documentaries on issues including sex trafficking, domestic abuse and prisons, along with several series of Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over. She has been awarded an MBE for her outstanding contribution to broadcasting and in 2024 was awarded a Grierson Trustees’ Award. Her first book, On The Frontline With The Women Who Fight Back was a double Sunday Times Bestseller in both hardback and paperback.