Renu interviewed about her NDE for BBC Radio 4: Sideways

Renu Arora appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Sideways, speaking with presenter Matthew Syed about the extraordinary and sometimes difficult-to-explain experience of joy existing alongside trauma, in an episode that explores the brain’s capacity to respond in unexpected ways when a person is under extreme threat. Renu contributes her experience of being hit by a bus in 2017, the near-death experience that followed and the profound emotional and creative transformation that began in its aftermath.

Public conversations about trauma can flatten experience into a single story, and while trauma is terrible, with effects that can be lasting, Renu’s account also contains moments of beauty, expanded consciousness and a love she has described as beyond ordinary language. Acknowledging those moments does not diminish the pain or physical consequences of what happened; it makes room for the full paradox.

This question sits at the centre of Renu’s major creative work, The Burgundy Book, which takes its name from one of three books she saw during her near-death experience: the book of an unlived future she returned to her body without opening. Through music, song and spoken word, the work explores what it means to live in the space between devastation and possibility.

The Sideways series is known for bringing together personal testimony and wider ideas, and Renu’s contribution offers a rare perspective on trauma - not a polished recovery narrative, but an invitation to consider how suffering and joy can occupy the same human experience.