PODULARITY

George Miller was born in Glasgow, educated in Paisley and Oxford, and has worked in publishing since 1989. He began as a rep selling English language teaching materials in Thessaloniki in northern Greece.

He then spent over a decade with Oxford University Press, where he became editorial director of the trade books department. While there he set up and commissioned the Very Short Introductions series and was responsible for the Oxford World’s Classics and The Oxford History of Art inter al.

From 2002 to 2007 he was Editorial Director of Granta Books in London, a small independent publishing house, where he concentrated mainly on developing the non-fiction list. His authors included Michael Bywater, Julian Baggini, Sofka Zinovieff and Simon Critchley, all of whom have now appeared in Podularity.com.

He went freelance in the summer of 2007 and in now based in Bath. His career currently has three main strands – writing, translating (from French), and sound recording.

Podularity.com was launched at the end of October ’07. Since then George Miller has interviewed Booker prize-winners, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Aravind Adiga, cult New York novelist Paul Auster, 2008 Pulitzer prize-winner Juno Diaz, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and best-selling children’s author Philip Pullman, among many others.

Why Did You Set Up Podularity?

The idea behind Podularity dates back at least five years. Podcasting didn’t exist then, but I could already see that audio was destined for an exciting future on the internet.

It seemed to me then – and still does – that there is no better way of inspiring a reader to pick up a book than hearing the author’s voice. That’s why there are so often long queues at the signing table at literary festivals.

I believe that the spoken word can be a very effective way of discovering literature, or indeed good writing of all kinds.

As a publisher, I was in the privileged position of spending much of my working day talking to authors about their books, and it was from those conversations that my enthusiasm for their work often began. Yet the reader, I realized, rarely gets the opportunity to hear authors talking about their writing.

It is true there are book programmes on radio and a growing number of literary festivals, but even so, the number of authors whose voices you can actually summon up as you sit in front of your computer screen is still very small. It’s Podularity’s mission to change that.

Podularity gives authors a platform to talk about their books. Its primary aim is not to sell books, but to engage your interest, capture you imagination, introduce you to new ideas.

In fact, the seed of Podularity dates back much further than five years…

I believe that the spoken word can be a very effective way of discovering literature, or indeed good writing of all kinds. Growing up in the 1970s, I vividly remember dramas such as Seneca’s Oedipus in Ted Hughes’s powerful translation and Strindberg’s A Dream Play on Radio Three.

I also remember a Radio Four series on Sunday afternoons which introduced great twentieth-century continental writers – including Camus, Kafka, Calvino, and Lorca. The programmes were only about twenty minutes long, and consisted of readings along with some introductory commentary. Today they might be dismissed as too pedagogical, but back then I recorded them avidly each week and followed up their suggestions for further reading.

I can still recall the shock of hearing the first page of Camus’s L’Etranger read aloud for the first time. Those programmes did more to shape the direction of my reading and my later studies – and ultimately my career – than any other single factor I can think of.