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PODCAST

Fictionable

Interviews, book chat and everything about the short stories and graphic fiction from all around the world appearing in Fictionable. "Storytellers, readers and creatives alike will love" – The Independent Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

fiction books

All Episodes

31:20

Susan Muaddi Darraj: 'My writing has changed forever...

Fictionable ·

2024/08/17

This Summer podcast series has brought us Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck – translated by Ellen Jones – and Jack Klausner. We bring it to a close with Susan Muaddi Darraj and her mighty story May You Wake Up to a Homeland.Darraj tells us that she started with an image, an old man in his kitchen "looking at this bizarre package of frozen food". That and the thought of him sitting there "surrounded by his children and almost none of them actually can sympathise with him" was enough to

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14:43

Jack Klausner: 'I write more on the darker end of the...

Fictionable ·

2024/08/10

Already this summer we've heard from Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones. This time we're getting under the surface of Jack Klausner's short story The Coalface.Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea. "It sort of spun out from there," he says.While Wales is no monolith, Klausner explains, in South Wales mining still looms large. But over the last

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18:04

Carolina Bruck: 'Fiction can transform the way we...

Fictionable ·

2024/08/03

This summer series has already brought us Samantha Harvey and Patrick Cash. Now it's time for Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones, with Bruck's short story China.We start with questions of vocabulary, as Bruck clears up exactly what a china is and fills us in on the cultural significance of the gaucho.The author says she was writing against Esteban Echeverría's poem The Captive, inverting the traditional Argentine dichotomy between civilisation and barbarity."Civilisation has always been

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15:36

Patrick Cash: 'The coming out story has been told so...

Fictionable ·

2024/07/27

Last time Samantha Harvey let the cat out of the bag, diving straight into the heart of her story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. This time Patrick Cash is a little less spoiler heavy as he talks about and reads from his story Trish Malone.Cash tells us how the cabaret artist who takes a leading role came to his rescue a few years back and has been "wandering around" ever since.He recalls work as a journalist reporting on the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity specialising in young LGBTQ+ homelessness, which

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34:26

Samantha Harvey: 'This is what fiction can do'

Fictionable ·

2024/07/18

The weather may be up the spout but it's still summer, so it's time for another batch of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Susan Muaddi Darraj, Carolina Bruck, Patrick Cash and Jack Klausner in this summer season. But Summer opens with Samantha Harvey and her mighty short story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch.If you haven't read it already, you might want to head over there before you hit play, because Harvey got straight to the nub of things as soon as we started talking.She told us how she got

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19:51

Jakub Żulczyk: 'We're all two inches tall'

Fictionable ·

2024/06/13

In this Spring series of podcasts we've heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. We bring it to a close with Jakub Żulczyk and his story Many Years of Hardships, translated by John and Małgorzata Markoff.Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Lights, a semi-autobiographical novel which the author turned into a hit show for HBO. But Many Years of Hardships draws on deeper roots."One of my first

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24:27

Rose Rahtz: 'What if you did have magical powers in a...

Fictionable ·

2024/06/06

This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister?Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?""I've always really liked the witch's response, because she's so perfunctory about it," she says. "She just goes 'I've been killing swine,

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20:38

Lauren Caroline Smith: 'There is something...

Fictionable ·

2024/05/28

In this Spring series of podcasts we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck and Grahame Williams. Now it's time for Lauren Caroline Smith and her short story The Placing of Hands.Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a predominantly secular culture.Our culture is very individualistic, Smith says, so if you're following Christ, "you’re not following the culture… to be so

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19:26

Grahame Williams: 'Random acts of violence could...

Fictionable ·

2024/05/23

Last time we heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, who told us that before her latest novel Kairos she'd "never written a love story". This time we welcome Grahame Williams and his short story Making It Happen.Like the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, an inspirational figure in Making It Happen, Williams says he's not much of a planner: "If there's a spark, then let's just start writing and see where it goes."He didn't set out to tell the story of the Troubles, but – as in his own childhood – they loom

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25:18

Jenny Erpenbeck: 'What you write down can be made to...

Fictionable ·

2024/05/10

Spring has finally sprung and with it another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. But we launch into Spring with Jenny Erpenbeck and her haunting short story Sloughing Off One Skin.When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck began by reading from the opening of the story in German as well as in Michael Hofmann's supple translation. Sloughing Off One Skin is set in motion by a piece

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25:20

Liam Hogan: 'I want to be entertained'

Fictionable ·

2024/03/09

We've already heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack. and Robert Neuwirth in this Winter series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Liam Hogan and his short story Backstory.Hogan tells us how it all came from his suspicion of heroes. "They often have it far too easy," he explains. "If you have someone with supreme skills then… what's the challenge?"There's a dark thread running through his collection of short stories, Happy Ending Not Guaranteed, but Hogan says "there

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30:18

Robert Neuwirth: 'I wanted it to be plausible as a...

Fictionable ·

2024/03/02

In this Winter series of podcasts we've heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth and Ariel Marken Jack. This time we welcome Robert Neuwirth and his short story The Disambiguation.Neuwirth tells us how his story started from a couple of one-liners that were driving him crazy and wound up stuffed full of computer code.We anthropomorphise the machines that surround us, he says, so we keep expecting "artificial intelligences to be human. But they're not. They're inhuman."While he tries to keep his

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34:47

Ariel Marken Jack: 'The way I fight back is through...

Fictionable ·

2024/02/23

We've already heard from Linda Mannheim and Richard Smyth in this Winter series, and now it's time for Ariel Marken Jack and their story The Bread Boy.Marken Jack tells us how their writing began in isolation, flat on their back with chronic fatigue syndrome. This debilitating illness is giving rise to writing they call "the most 21st-century form of literature that I can imagine… Who among us doesn't have that feeling that almost everything in life is completely outside of our control?"They reflect

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32:58

Richard Smyth: 'We all need an Otherland'

Fictionable ·

2024/02/16

Last week we heard from Linda Mannheim, who told us that the only way she can go back to the neighbourhood where she grew up is in fiction. This time we welcome Richard Smyth and his short story Karóly Bálint's Metaphor.Smyth explains how his story isn’t exactly set in Budapest and reflects on how the bleakness of the steppe echoes the stereotypical grimness of the north of England.Writing in the third person can feel "restrictive", he continues, because he wants "to see inside", while the first

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24:06

Linda Mannheim: 'What is a happy ending?'

Fictionable ·

2024/02/10

In this Winter series of podcasts, we'll be hearing from Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack, Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan. We start off with Linda Mannheim, who joined us down the line from Berlin.Mannheim explains how the central character in her story Those Last Days appeared to her "out of the blue" and how she found her fiction inexorably drawn back to her childhood in Washington Heights.Things were a little different back then to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical – there was certainly less singing

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23:24

Catriona Bolt: 'Everyone in the story associates...

Fictionable ·

2023/10/28

We've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie and Shauna Mackay on the Fictionable podcast. Now we bring this autumn series to a close with Catriona Bolt and her mycological short story Bloom.Bolt tells us how she fell in love with mushrooms despite, or perhaps because of, their double nature. These mysterious organisms were the perfect lens through which to explore the expectations surrounding young women at the beginning of the 19th century, she explains, an issue that

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14:42

Shauna Mackay: 'It's listening to the characters and...

Fictionable ·

2023/10/21

In this autumn series of podcasts we've heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and Seán Padraic Birnie. This week we welcome Shauna Mackay to discuss her short story Matching up the Pattern at the Join.Mackay tells us how her short stories are driven by voice, by characters she conjures up and then follows on the page: "I sound like a witch now." The characters come from mixing and banging words together, she explains, so she enjoys spending time with them, even if they're sometimes a little

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22:57

Seán Padraic Birnie: 'I was quite depressed and...

Fictionable ·

2023/10/14

This autumn we've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and her band, Qarpa. This week we have an appointment with Seán Padraic Birnie and his story The Medical Room.Birnie tells us how he was fuelled by frustration at work and struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It made me laugh, I think," he says, "but I wasn't sure it would make anyone else laugh."Elements of the gruesome office mechanics in The Medical Room are drawn from life, Birnie explains, but the pull of horror fiction lays

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31:19

Irena Karpa: 'Literature must entertain, especially...

Fictionable ·

2023/10/08

After hearing last week from M John Harrison, who discussed how he makes fiction from fragments of reality, this week we turn it up to eleven as we welcome Irena Karpa. Fuelled by the latest track from her band, Qarpa, she reads from Kate Tsurkan's translation of her short story, Fellow Traveler, and gives us the inside track on that journey.Karpa explains why the language from the streets that she used in her early novels came as such a shock to Ukrainian literary culture, and how her pride in her

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30:10

M John Harrison: 'How do you know who’s alive and...

Fictionable ·

2023/09/29

Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie, Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt. But we launch this autumn podcast series with M John Harrison and his haunting short story, I Can't Tell.Harrison tells us how he constructs his stories from fragments of real life, filed in notebooks and then reassembled into uncanny structures on the page. At one stage, this process was "consciously not very fictiony" he says, but by the time you’ve spent ten years exploring the

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