All posts filed under: literature

Alison Leslie Gold, ‘salvager of other people’s stories’

  This is a podcast I produced for Notting Hill Editions with Alison Leslie Gold, who is perhaps best known for her book Anne Frank Remembered, which she wrote with Miep Gies, one of the people who protected the Frank family during the war. Before her collaboration on that book, Alison had experienced a lost decade, in which she descended into alcohol addiction. Writing the Anne Frank book represented a return to life, a rediscovery of interest in other people and their stories. Other stories were to follow. She became, as she puts it, ‘a miner, a midwife, a salvager of other people’s stories’. But, as she writes in the Prologue to her new book, Found and Lost: She goes on: When I met Alison in London last autumn she began by telling me more about the book’s origins:

Ishiguro on Nocturnes

And here is the part of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro in which I talk to him about his short story collection, Nocturnes. This was recorded first (hence it’s part 1) but six years on, my feeling is that Part 2 is in fact the best place to start as he sets his earlier books in context.

Two-part interview with 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro

Half a dozen years ago, I was delighted to be asked by Faber & Faber to interview Kazuo Ishiguro for a special two-part podcast to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories, Nocturnes. In the first part, we focused on the new book, and in the second I asked him about his background, previous novels, and the effects of early success (and intriguingly, he makes what I think must have been one of his first public indication that he was working on an idea which would become the 2015 novel, The Buried Giant). To listen to the podcasts, click on the links below. To whet your appetite, here are a couple of extracts from our conversation. Kazuo Ishiguro Early on, when I was six or seven, I very much thought of Japan as my home and I very much thought we were about to return at any moment. And I was much more in touch with Japanese culture then. I was being sent comics and books so there was an attempt to …

Philip Hoare on Leviathan

I see that Philip Hoare is publishing the third volume of his trilogy about the sea next week. RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR comes nine years after his award-winning book on the culture and history of whales, Leviathan, so I though I would re-present the interview I did with Philip about that book back then in a coffee shop in Bath (to listen click on the player above or download here)… As the publisher’s blurb puts it: The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book …

Congratulations to Akhil Sharma

Last week Indian-American novelist Akhil Sharma won the Folio Prize for his novel Family Life. I met Akhil when he visited London last spring to talk about his eagerly awaited second book. Akhil was born in New Delhi and migrated to the US in the late seventies. Having initially pursued a career in investment banking, he came to prominence as a writer in 2001 with his first acclaimed novel, An Obedient Father, which won that year’s Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (available from Faber). Akhil Sharma was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, so expectations around his second novel were considerable, but the process of writing that book was for Akhil a long and painful one – as you’ll hear in this interview, he likens the many drafts the book went through to a war of attrition. It’s testament to Akhil’s skill that the reader is unaware of those years of labour, as she races through the story of Ajay Mishra who, like his creator, came to America aged eight, and …

Anna Karenina revisited

“The text of Anna Karenina is like a Persian carpet of intricate symmetrical design, whose workmanship can only be appreciated by seeing the reverse side.” Rosamund Bartlett I had the pleasure of chairing Rosamund Bartlett‘s event at the Oxford Literary Festival yesterday afternoon in which she talked about Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, and the experience of producing the first new translation of the novel for Oxford World’s Classics in almost a century. For people who didn’t make it to the event, I thought I would repost this interview I did with Rosamund last summer in my (fledgling) Conversations with Translators series.

(Nearly) two hundred years of the Old Vic

The Old Vic first opened its doors in May 1818. Back then, building a new theatre south of the river was a commercially risky venture, and the Royal Coburg Theatre (as it was originally known) was only made viable by the recent construction of Waterloo Bridge. The first night programme included a melodrama, a pantomime and a harlequinade. Outside, Waterloo Road was unpaved and only half-completed, Waterloo station was still thirty years in the future. The approach to the theatre was across a badly lit bridge and then through Lambeth Marsh and theatre-goers worried about falling prey to thieves… Terry Coleman’s fascinating history of the Old Vic covers all of the astonishing ups and downs in the theatre’s history from opening night via Lilian Baylis and the Olivier era as first home to the National, to Kevin Spacey and beyond. I was lucky enough to get the chance to talk to him about it in this interview recorded on location in the circle bar last month for the Faber podcast. And here is an interview …

Conversations with translators (II): Rosamund Bartlett on Anna Karenina

For this, the second in a series of Conversations with Translators (following my interview with Oliver Ready on Crime and Punishment from earlier this year), we stick with the Russians and turn to a new version of Anna Karenina produced by Rosamund Bartlett for Oxford University Press. This was in fact my third visit to see Rosamund – we met previously to talk about her Chekhov translations, About Love and other stories, which is published in Oxford World’s Classics and again in 2010 when her acclaimed biography of Tolstoy came out. Of this life, A.N. Wilson (himself one of Tolstoy’s biographers) wrote: “The extraordinary character of the giant is captured better by Bartlett than by any previous biographer” and former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams  – who is also a Russianist and translator – chose it as one of his books of the year and called it “superbly readable”. You can hear my interview with Rosamund about the biography here. In this new interview (click on the Soundcloud player above to listen), we talk about …

Anton Chekhov: About Love and other stories (an Oxford World’s Classics audio guide)

Without quite planning it, Podularity seems to have been having a bit of a Russian season of late, so I thought it would be worth re-presenting this audio guide which OUP commissioned me to produce a couple of years ago with Rosamund Bartlett, translator of Chekhov’s short stories (and also Anna Karenina (forthcoming, 2014)). Here’s a link to all the OWC audio guides. “Seventeen peerless examples of how much life you can put into a few pages of fiction if you have Chekhov’s economical mind, his eyes and ears, his feel for comedy and his sense of humanity. Chekhov is better known for his plays. But these are small masterpieces of their own, in a revelatory new translation.” – The Economist Click on the links below to hear Rosamund Bartlett, who edited and translated the stories in the collection, About Love, introduce Chekhov and his work and read from her translations. Who was Anton Chekhov? Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) came from an unlikely background for a future literary celebrity. Unlike most of his fellow writers, he …