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Lucy Ash profiles people who are making waves across Europe, with individual stories which expose the continent's cultural, political and economic fault lines. Wu Ming - an Italian writers' collective rather than one person - is turning literary conventions on their head and questioning the political establishment. They started out as pranksters, hoodwinking the media, cooking up stories about a missing British cyclist and an artistic chimpanzee. Now their exploits are mainly confined to the page following the unexpected success of their first novel Q which has been translated into more than 20 languages. They are prolific bloggers and writers of non-fiction on issues they care about such as Italy's colonial record in Africa and the threat of fascism in Europe.Lucy Ash samples their brand of art and activism, first at a reading in Turin and then with Italy's most famous social protest movement, which is fighting a high-speed rail link under the Alps. Producer: Mark Savage.