George Miller was born in Glasgow, educated at Oxford, and has been working in publishing since the late 1980s. His first publishing job was as a rep for Oxford University Press in northern Greece. He then worked for OUP in Oxford for over a decade, during which time he started the Very Short Introductions series. He was then editorial director for Granta Books in London for five years, where one of his titles (Barbara Demick: Nothing to Envy) won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
He recorded his first audio interview 15 years ago. It may still exist on a Sony minidisk somewhere (remember those?), but it’s not to be found in the ether. This is no great loss as it took him a bit of time to become comfortable with simultaneously handling the technology and steering a conversation that had some semblance of coherence, relevance, shape, and awareness of the passage of time…
Some of his early interviews were pressed onto CD (remember those?) and distributed to Granta’s sales reps. Some of those CDs may still exist in a dusty box. But the coming of podcasts and online distribution was a Great Leap Forward and more or less came at the right time for Miller to go freelance a decade ago. He set up the website Podularity in 2007 to bring together his work for a variety of clients that have included Faber, Polity, OUP, Blackwells, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the Royal Literary Fund.
Over the years he has interviewed several hundred authors, on audio, video and on stage at literary festival (notably Bristol, Oxford and Bath). Interviewees have included: Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, Susan Cain, James Shapiro, Mary Beard, Alain de Botton, Atul Gawande, Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Chris Anderson, Alex Ross, Martin Kemp, David Crystal, Alberto Manguel, Paul Auster, Carl Honoré, Simon Singh, Steven Pinker, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, P.D. James, and Jon Ronson. He has also interviewed poets, chefs, comedians, politicians, musicians, and composers …
He remains involved in a wide variety of publishing activities, including editing and translating, and now often takes a video camera out along with his audio recorder, but audio remains his great enthusiasm – for its immediacy, its intimacy, its ability to take you imaginatively almost anywhere.