SHOP TALK WITH WRITERS – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Elena Lappin interviews Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley's novella The Party is published by Jonathan Cape.

The Party

Buy Happy Death Club by Naomi Westerman

2-Part Halloween Special with playwright and writer Naomi Westerman

Interview by Elena Lappin

POLAR VORTEX is a funny, moving, deeply personal and original graphic novel by cartoonist and writer Denise Dorrance. She talks to Elena Lappin about how she found a way to create art out of dealing with her mother’s dementia - during an ice storm.

POLAR VORTEX is published by New River (UK) and The Experiment Publishing (US).

THE ROAD TO THE COUNTRY is Chigozie Obioma’s third novel, set in the time of Nigerian Civil War. In this podcast, we talk about how writing about a traumatic past can help us understand, and perhaps change, the present.

Elena Lappin’s Substack on Chigozie Obioma: elenalappin.substack.com

Credits:

Host: Elena Lappin

Guest: Chigozie Obioma

Creative Team:

Katherine Stroud, Publicity and Media (prcollective.co.uk)

Max Anstruther, Audio Producer (startsmallstudios.com)

Caroline O’Donoghue is one of the most talented and original writers on the British literary scene. In 2018, I interviewed her for a different podcast, about her excellent debut novel Promising Young Women. I loved that novel’s deep seriousness, along with its provocative humour and cinematic pacing. She was a debut author unafraid to be both open and fragile.

Since then, she has written two bestselling adult novels (SCENES OF A GRAPHIC NATURE and THE RACHEL INCIDENT), and the very popular YA fantasy series ALL OUR HIDDEN GIFTS. SKIPSHOCK is the first book in a new series which may also be categorised as YA and fantasy, but for me, it is just a wonderful, genre-bending read about two young people in a dystopian world controlled by the all-powerful currency of time. It feels as surreal and familiar as The Matrix.

Caroline O’Donoghue is also a screenwriter and an award-winning podcaster (Sentimental Garbage). Meeting her again after seven years, I was curious to hear how she does all this with such a strong sense of purpose. She is fun, witty and charming, but what is most interesting is her sharp analysis of where her very original ideas come from, and how she refuses to be categorised - and misunderstood.

Born in Cork, Ireland, Caroline O’Donoghue now lives in London. She has a unique take on the new wave of Irish literary talent, which she both admires and does not feel connected to.

Of course I am an Irish writer, but I am also a London writer.

Not unlike some of her fictional heroines, Caroline O’Donoghue defines her own path, with a great sense of freedom and a very adventurous imagination.

I bet the next seven years. will be full of even more surprises.

SHIPSHOCK is published by Walker Books.

Elena Lappin interviews Cheryl Oliver about her sister, Diane Oliver (1943-1966), author of NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STORIES; and Ann Goldstein, about her translation of Italian novelist Alba de Cespedes (1911-1997), author of THERE'S NO TURNING BACK from 1938. Literary rediscoveries of important writing from other eras, acutely relevant today.

listen here

We recorded this podcast with Megan Hunter at Pritchard & Ure, an unusual bookshop/cafe/gallery in Camden, above a garden centre. It’s a place that feels both buzzy and peaceful, and not unlike this author, full of surprises. Before we sat down to talk, Megan enjoyed the books on display, floating among them like a radiant book fairy. She pointed to many of the titles as volumes she loved or knew or had at home (or all of the above). I showed her a few carefully wrapped antiquarian volumes (several first editions of Virginia Woolf’s novels, for example), which happen to be closely linked to the period and style of Megan Hunter’s new novel, Days of Light. She writes in a blue-painted shed in her garden in Cambridgeshire, she told me, and I could immediately see her there, writing on a sofa, no wifi, in a world of her own. A world she both imagines and inhabits with deep knowledge and feeling.

Her debut novel The End We Start From was almost a prose poem about new motherhood in dangerous times, and everything she writes, she says, ‘starts with the sentence’. This novel, too, is both fragile and robust, strong ideas distilled into delicate prose: “She marvels at the way a single day can unravel everything, like ribbon pulled from a present.” The narrative of Days of Light gently flows around six important days in the life of its protagonist, Ivy, a dreamy young girl when we meet her in 1938, full of poetic awe and love for her brother. She never loses that dreaminess as the world begins and continues to crumble around her, over many decades. Days of Light not only tells the very moving story of Ivy, but also of the many possibilities she plays with in her mind, because, well, they are all there.

At 28, I thought - is my life over, as a creative person? This novel is very much about new possibilities.

Megan Hunter speaks seriously but with an infectious smile and laugh as she reflects on being a mother (she has two children), religion (she studied to become an Anglican priest and this novel is luminous with her own take on faith), marriage (she married young), sexuality (her own has changed), poetry, literature, history, art, nature…. Each of her three novels has a different ring to it. I tell her that although Days of Light is clearly inspired by and partly set in the literary and artistic tableaux of the Bloomsbury Circle, I feel it has her very authentic own voice - on life and art.

There is a very intriguing bit of our conversation about how Megan Hunter adapts her own books into screenplays. She sees it as an opportunity to ‘make more changes to the original narrative’. Is a novel ever really finished? Or is there always more to explore, more possibilities…?

This novelist invites her readers to enjoy the unexpected, and to understand loss as part of one’s freedom to try yet another journey.

DAYS OF LIGHT BY MEGAN HUNTER

THE END WE START FROM (film)

Publisher: Picador (Pan Macmilllan)