The archive
8 published episodes on craft, publishing and the working life of a writer. Filter by topic or search for an author.
Ep. 12601:55Craftwith Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Novelist & essayist
Four years, one abandoned narrator and a shelf of Biafran war memoirs. Adichie on research as a cure for fear, the danger of the single story, and why she threw away two years of work.
Ep. 12502:01Craftwith Kazuo Ishiguro — Novelist, Nobel laureate
On the four-week writing 'crash', building a narrator whose feelings are all in the silences, and why he drafts imagining a reader in translation.
Ep. 12401:54Craftwith Margaret Atwood — Novelist & poet
Frame stories, longhand mornings and why she'd rather be called a filing clerk than a prophet. Also: read your contracts more carefully than your reviews.
Ep. 12301:45Revisionwith Colson Whitehead — Novelist
Why he shelved his best idea until he could carry it, how he rationed the research, and building a novel where every state is a different genre of America.
Ep. 12201:55Craftwith Olga Tokarczuk — Novelist, Nobel laureate
Why a broken shape can be the honest one, what clinical psychology gave her prose, and literature as 'civic equipment' for tenderness.
Ep. 12101:49Craftwith Bernardine Evaristo — Novelist & professor
Forty years of building instead of waiting to be discovered, writing twelve interlocking lives, and why she has no interest in a 'worthy' book.
Ep. 12001:52Purposewith Ocean Vuong — Poet & novelist
From poetry to the novel, writing scenes where nothing beautiful happens, and building something permanent for people a country treated as temporary.
Ep. 11901:52Revisionwith Min Jin Lee — Novelist
Throwing out a finished novel, over-reporting on purpose, and why patience is a craft skill rather than a virtue.
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