Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S1 Ep5: 2019 Shortlist Readings

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Fiction + More Fiction! In this episode Zing Tsjeng brings you the Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist Readings, but she's also grabbed the authors for exclusive chats to celebrate and honour the voices of these exceptional talents. Featuring Anna Burns, Pat Barker, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Diana Evans, Tayari Jones and Madeline Miller. Books covered: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker Circe by Madeline Miller Ordinary People by Diana Evans My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite Milkman by Anna Burns An American Marriage by Tayari Jones For more details head over to www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk or check out #WomensPrize and @WomensPrize on Twitter and Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At Harrison Health Care, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit Harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast produced by Fremantle. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives,

all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh and you've joined me here at the magnificent Kudurgan Hall. The announcement of 2019's winner is incredibly close and in our next episode we're going to be talking with the winner fresh off the stage after collecting her award. But before that, we're very lucky to be here tonight. It's no easy task to bring together some of the best women authors on the planet in one podcast episode. But since you've joined us this year for all our amazing Bailey's book bar events, there is no way we'd let you miss out on this.

Thanks to Waterstones and the Women's Prize for Fiction, most of the shortlisted authors are here tonight, joining 2019 Chair of Judges Professor Kate Williams on stage, to discuss and read from their nominated books. But we've also managed to grab each of them for a special exclusive chat just for you. Anna Burns wasn't available to attend tonight's event, but she was good enough to sit down with us

in the orchestra's office to discuss her nominated book, Milkman. All three of your novels, including Milkman, have drawn on your experience of growing up during the troubles. You've said in interviews that you only really reckoned with that upbringing when you actually left. So what was it about leaving that allowed you that distance? Well, Belfast was a pressurized time and place

and like others around me, I had to focus on surviving as best as I could. And for me, that meant cutting off and what was happening around me. I don't mean I didn't notice if things happened. It was my feelings. There was a disconnection between my thoughts about these events and happenings and my feelings.

And of course, I was so young, I didn't know I was doing that. and it's a way of coping it was only when I moved away to London in the 80s that I gained the space and the mental space to enable me to look at

what had been happening in my life and for the first time to start reading and examining my history and the impact of those days upon myself and upon a whole society it wouldn't have been safer possible

for me to do that whilst living through the turmoil and the danger and the sadness. You've talked about being the kind of author who starts writing without a grand plan in your head or a sense of where you're going, you just pick up the pen and you just start writing. What do you think that brings to your work?

I can only write what comes, what my characters tell me, without trying to force anything or watching the clock. That's a vital driver of my work. At the start, and often not just at the start it's a very messy process there's a lot going on underneath

where I can feel underpinning is taking place before I get what that is a book eventually develops and the themes and the plots appear as well as the story unfolding often it unfolds in ways I

could never have anticipated and if I was trying to keep a tight control in it I'd miss out on all that I'd miss out on the unexpected, which is what I like coming to me in my writing. My job is to hold the whole emerging book in my mind with its mix of polished sections, sketched out areas and gaps, and to stay ready for my characters to tell me more. If I try too hard to direct all that, the book will just stop until I get all that out again. so I've learned through experience not to do that.

How do you write? Do you need specific conditions to power your creativity in the words? Do you have a simple set-up that you have to do or a simple routine? I write best when I am happy and calm and peaceful and warm, preferably with quite a bit of time to hang out on the page. Also, cups of tea are good. Often when I finish writing, I go out for long walks with my dictaphone. notebook and my characters will come back as I'm walking. I'm not at my desk, so I use the dictaphone

to get their latest. I mean, they don't always, it's just in case they do. And that could be anywhere in the book. I could have been working on something in Chapter 5 and they'll come in and tell me the beginning of something that they gave me ages ago in Chapter 6. So I have to carry it all around with me. I think that's so interesting because you can really tell reading the book. It sounds as if it's meant to be spoken aloud. Yes. Well, that is it about the rhythm. and that's why I'll always go where the energy is because that's where the rhythm is. How do you keep all that information in your head?

You seem to have so many different ways of putting stuff down on the page. Are there times where you just think I've forgotten where I've put that one thing or I've forgotten where this is meant to slot in there? How do you keep hold of all that information? Well, that's it. That's the work. That's what I do.

I mean, I've had people say to me, well, how can you just wait for characters to come? I wish that would happen to me. And I think, well, I carry the whole book about, every single word. I know where every single word is in every single place. So when it comes in, it's like, I just carry it around with me all the time. So it's quite a project, but I'm not complaining because, you know, I love doing it. It's just how I do it. So that's, that's the work. And at the end of the day, I usually am quite shattered, but in a lovely way, you know, you've done

something wonderful and, you know, I'd have to watch something like something that doesn't text me. I couldn't go to a cinema and watch a really in-depth, difficult film or something. You know, I mean, something with a lot of ideas. I like watching easy things, or if I'm going to read, it will be something quite light. Because at the end of the day, because my brain can't really cope with anything else at that point. So all my more serious reading or whatever would have to happen on a day off. Anna Burns is not here. So Breed, she read the audiobook of Milkman so wonderfully, has very kindly come, is going to come up and read from Milkman.

for us. So please do welcome breach to the stage. Good evening. This is an introduction from Anna Burns to her novel, Milkman. Milkman is about an entire society living under intense pressure, from long-term violence, from relentless surveillance, and from unfounded rumour and gossip.

The narration is through the personal voice of an 18-year-old girl who was living in this society, and who is trying to ignore the turmoil around her. She finds herself, though, being pulled more and more into it, especially when a middle-aged paramilitary called Milkman begins to sexually stalk her. This section focuses on the narrator's mother berating her

for not yet being married. Since my 16th birthday, two years earlier, Ma had tormented herself and me because I was not married. My two older sisters were married. Three of my brothers, including the one who had died and the one on the run had got married. Probably two, my oldest brother, gone errant, dropped off the face of the earth

and even though she'd no proof was married. My other older sister, the unmentable second sister, also married. So why wasn't I married? This non-wedlock was selfish. disturbing of the God-given order and unsettling for the younger girls, she said. Look at them, she continued, and there they were,

standing behind Ma, bright-eyed, perky, grinning. From the look of them, not one of these sisters seemed unsettled to me. Set's a bad example, said Ma. If you don't get married, they'll think it's all right for them not to get married. None of these sisters, age seven, eight and nine, was anywhere near the marrying teens yet. What would happen to, went on Ma, as often she would go on whenever we had this one-sided conversation. When your looks are gone and then nobody wants you.

I got fed up answering as in, I'm not telling you, Ma. Never will I tell you, Ma. Leave me alone, Ma. Because the less I gave, the less she could get in. This was tiresome for her as well as for me, but in her endeavours, Ma was not without backup. In the distrust, she was not without backup. In the distrust, there existed a whole chivy of mothers doing their dampness to get their daughters wed. Their panic was real, visceral. Certainly for them, this was no cliche, no comedy, not to be dismissed, also not unusual. What would have been unusual would have been for a mother to have stepped forth from among them who was not of that scene. So it became a battle of wills between my and me as to which of us would wear the other down first.

anytime she'd get with I might be dating, never through me. I couldn't walk in the door, but it would be, is he the right religion? Followed by, is he not already married? It was vital after the right religion that he not be already married. And because I continued to give nothing, this became proof he wasn't the right religion that he was married and, more than likely, not only a paramilitary, but an enemy defender of the state paramilitary as well. She did horror stories on herself, filling in blanks where I refused to supply information.

This meant she wrote the entire script herself. She began religious observances and visits to the holy men with the intention my younger gleeful sisters informed me that I give up these godless, bigamous terrorists I was falling in love with one after the other. and that I instead fall in love suitably this time. I let her do this, especially once I got involved with maybe boyfriend, did I let her do it. There was no way ever I was going to give her him.

She'd have done a process, had them through the system, one assessment question after another assessment question, hurrying things, hurrying things, trying to complete on things, complete on things, end things which meant dating, begin things which meant marriage, tie things up which meant babies, to make me, for the love of God, get a move on like the rest. My name is Owen Cole Braithwaite and I am the author of my sister, The Serial Killer. I read in an interview that you felt really paralysed by the idea of writing a book

after you were shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and then you realise you just wanted to write something fun. How did you come to that realization? I mean, I had written novels before, but I hadn't sent any work to any agents or anything like that. So I was looking for this story that was going to change the world. Like, that was going to be magnificent, you know, the great novel. And because of that, I wasn't happy with anything that I was doing.

So I thought, right, I was 29 at the time. I was going to be turning 30 in a few months. I thought, you know, this is ridiculous. You've wanted to be an author all your life. and you've never even sent work to an agent. You've got to get rid of this fear that's shackling you, this ideal that's shackling you and write something for yourself. Well, I still wanted to write the great novel,

but I thought, you're not going to worry about what anybody's going to think. This is just for you, something you love, something that's fun to write. I tried a few things in terms of this style because I wasn't worried again about how it would be received. And, yeah, so that's how this novel was born. What were your siblings' reactions to the books? Well, you know what? The one that's right after me, she, you know, at first she was on board because, you know,

she basically said she deserved some of the royalties because I had written the whole book about her. And, you know, she was fully on board with it. But then after a while, she started to get irritated because people were assuming that she was the serial killer one. And she thought, like, hang on a minute. Like, why does everybody think it's, you know, it's me? you know, and she made this argument that out of the three of us girls, myself or the younger's girl, were the ones who are actually more likely to commit those sort of crimes, which she does have a point. She's very sort of, she has this whole goody two-shoes vibe. She never does anything wrong,

but everybody who knows us always kind of assumes that, you know, she fits that bill. You know, she's not a huge fan of that anymore. What was your reaction when you heard you'd been long-listed? You know what? This whole journey with this book has been ridiculous because this wasn't a book that I thought would grab the sort of attention that it has grabbed, you know, and it just goes to show that this idea of the great novel isn't really true to life or to what people, you know, want to experience.

So, again, I'm familiar with the Women's Prize, but I always thought of it as very literary. And my book, I don't consider it to be. particularly literary in that sense. I mean, it does play with some things, but I didn't write it with that mindset in mind. I didn't write it with any awards in mind. Being on the long list really did take me by surprise.

Hi, good evening, everyone. At this point, the Ayala, the youngest sister, has killed her third boyfriend. and her oldest sister has had to, you know, they've just finished cleaning up the mess and tossing him into the water. So the point where I'm reading is basically, you know, Cori Day, the oldest sister, asking, I'll have some questions about this thing that they've just done. Who was he? Femi I scribble the name down

We are in my bedroom I lie sitting cross-legged on my sofa, her head resting on the back of the cushion While she took a bath I set the dress she had been wearing on fire Now she wears a rose-colored t-shirt and smells of baby powder

And his surname? She frowns pressing her lips together and then she shakes her head As though trying to shake the name back into the forefront of her brain it doesn't come. She shrugs. I should have taken his wallet.

I closed the notebook. It is small, smaller than the palm of my hand. I watched a TEDx video once where the man said that carrying around a notebook and penning one happy moment each day had changed his life. That is why I bought the notebook. On the first page I wrote,

I saw a white owl through my bedroom window. The notebook has been mostly empty since. It's not my fault, you know. but I don't know. I don't know what she's referring to. Does she mean the inability to recall his surname or his death? Tell me what happened. Femmy wrote her poem. She can remember the poem but she cannot remember his last name. I dare you to find a flaw in her beauty or to bring forth a woman who can stand beside her without wilting. And he gave it to her written on a piece of paper folded twice, reminiscent of our secondary school days when kids would pass love notes to one another in the back row of classrooms. She was moved by all this, but then Ayala is always moved by the worship of her merits, and so she agreed to be his woman. On their one-month anniversary, she stabbed him in the bathroom of his apartment.

She didn't mean to, of course. He was angry, screaming at her, his onion-stained breath hot against her face. But why was she carrying the knife? The knife was for her protection. You never knew with men. They wanted what they wanted when they wanted it. She didn't mean to kill him. She wanted to warn him off, but he wasn't scared of her weapon.

He was over six feet tall, and she must have looked like a doll to him with her small frame, long eyelashes and rosy fool lips. Her description, not mine. She killed him on the first strike, a jab straight to the heart, but then she stabbed him twice more to be sure. He sank to the floor. she could hear her own breathing and nothing else. Thank you.

Thank you, Incan. Marvelous. So, I mean, the relationship between sisters is such a key one to fiction, particularly women's fiction. And your two, they really couldn't be more different. You really delineate the difference between them and between them so well. So what is it about the relationship between sisters that makes it such a rich topic for fiction? Well, I don't know about fiction in general. I think with this story because initially I was going to

make it, it was supposed to be about two friends but then I wanted you know you choose your friends you don't choose your family you know you're sort of stuck with them and I wanted to explore

this idea of a bond that you can't you know fully free yourself from because AILA is technically dragging you know Corriday with her making it impossible for Corridi to live a good, pure life. So, you know, this sense of, you know,

and Corrid is sort of shackled by her in this sense of responsibility towards her younger sister. And I think that with most friendships, at some point you would walk away. You'd be like, okay, you know, I'm done. You're merging too much. Yeah.

Three is too many now, but with... That pushes... This further push you away we talk. But with your simple... you know, you've, you've, you've, you've got to, especially if it's younger, you've got to protect them no matter what. Yeah, since she is very protective, isn't she? Very devoted. My name's Diana Evans and the book that I've been shortlisted for is my third novel, Ordinary People. And I'm a former dancer and a journalist and I continue to do journalism and

write books. It's my raison and etre. I love words. The book has such a banging soundtrack. Yeah. I love how you even list it at the back of the book and obviously you name it after John Mergent song. How do you include music in your work? Do you have an idea of what songs would appear in this book in advance or does it just come to you?

It doesn't come in advance. The scene comes first. And if it's a scene that naturally includes music such as a heart. party scene which opens the book or two friends talking over music and drinks. So the music emerges as a presence in the scene and then I choose the right song later. The playlist kind of happened by itself. It was done when the book was finished because there was so much music in it. And I felt that I was writing a musical of a different kind.

So it just felt very natural to actually have an actual playlist at the end of it. The book captures a really distinct community of people, middle class, utterly mobile, culturally affluent, black Londoners. But I've actually never read a book which captured that particular group with such accuracy and affection before. So did it feel important to you to get it right because there are so few portraits of what that life is like out there? Yeah, absolutely.

I just felt we were absent and invisible and that there were only certain themes in black life that were being represented and there were often negative themes. So I wanted to write a book that really put the Black British Miller class on the map explicitly and celebrated it and also gave a window into that world in a very ordinary way. So it was very important to me that there were scenes of ordinary, life as an expression that this group of people exists and that they're a part of London and they're part of the fabric of British culture, not black British culture on its own, but they're the

fabric of British culture. Beyond writing to produce something brilliant and engaging, what kind of motivations do you have for picking the pen up? Mental health? I have to write. Other I'm a bit crazy. Writing is good for the soul. I have so many ideas and words, sentences fizzing around inside me. And there's so many stories and characters that I want to see in pages and in books and in bookshops. I've always loved the possibilities of language and the worlds that you can create. And if I can make the characters come alive with the words, that's a very thrilling thing to experience. It's only now that I really think of myself as a writer, three books in. Why do you think it took you that long to acclimatize yourself to idea that you're an author now?

Writing has such a lofty mysticism around it. With each book, I always feel like I'm never going to finish it and that it's too hard and I'm never going to get to the end. And when you complete a book, then it makes you feel a little bit more like a writer. So, the first book could have been a fluke you know the second book was just okay well you did it again can you do it again so once i'd done it three times then i thought okay yeah maybe maybe i'm a writer now third times a charm yes and so the first one took me four and a half years the second one took me three and a half years which was pretty quick for me and the third book was actually the hardest so you know that took me seven years and with each book it seemed to you know it seemed

to get harder because each book is its own piece of architecture. It's like building a major building, that's what it feels like. To make everything work as a whole and as a story and own in its own pattern and synchrony and everything working structurally is very, very difficult. Even though with each project, I've always felt that I'm never going to finish it. I would have just kept working at it until I'd finished because, you know, and the more years go by, the stronger that feeling becomes, because the more time that you spent on this book. So when it got to year five with ordinary people, I thought, well, absolutely have to finish this now, you know, but I could have gone on for another 10 years, you know, who knows. So when it is finally

finished, it's a huge moment of celebration for me. Hi everybody. It's good to be here. I'm going to read a little scene from ordinary people, which is about the lives of two London couples over

the course of the year. It's about men and women living together with their children in a hidden section of Britain's middle class. In this scene, our primary couple Melissa and Michael, are acrimoniously reunite. at the end of a working day, which for Melissa has been hijacked by motherhood and a mouse problem at home.

So Michael has just taken out his phone, having shortly arrived home from work. There's something weird about this house, Melissa said. Are you listening to me? Yes, he looked back up at her. You haven't even been home for five minutes and you're already staring at your phone. Can't you just be here now that you're finally here? Can't you just be present? I am present.

Melissa thought that when Michael was looking at his phone, he was basically just sitting there doing nothing, but she was wrong. When he was staring at his phone, as she put it, he was not just staring at his phone. He was looking for more exciting jobs he might apply for. He was checking for important messages, checking the news,

keeping up to date with Barack Obama and Lewis Hamilton developments, checking house prices and less crime-ridden areas they might move to, buying music, a recipe for chicken patties and now very usefully and imperatively he thought asking Google for any surefire tips on eliminating mice

everything life was in his phone a whole world of information and activity she was so yesterday she was so prehistoric but still hopeful of a peaceful evening he put the phone back in his pocket and walked to the

kitchen to make her see that he was actually here all of him. She was holding Blake on her hip, and she kissed him with her tight lips, which untitened for the moment of the kiss. Blake, the immediate transformer, a little wizard,

the fact of him, a wand. He said we have to put wire wool in the holes on the outside of the house, she carried on, wiping the countertop with a frantic motion. So we need to buy some wire wool. It's wool made of wire?

Okay. Are you feeling all right. I'm fine. Okay. Michael was hungry. His stomach was growling. He opened a cupboard looking for food. There were some crackers, some apple rice cakes. There was a pot of rice cooking on the hob, but nothing to go with it, apparently. Not that he was expecting her to have cooked him dinner. Hell no. He opened the fridge, a box of eggs. Michael did not like eggs. Some pulverizations in little Tupperwez, some condiments and a few other things like that, and a fromage fray the size of a thimble. God, there's no food, man, he said. Melissa bristled inside. Her inner Manhattan despiser of

patriarchy was computing that he had just berated her for not maintaining their domestic plenty during her non-working day. What? she said. What, he said, because in fact he had half speaking to himself, exclaiming, rather, at the lack of existent munchies, which he always liked to indulge in on arriving home from work, ravenous. But she didn't see it that way. Are you complaining? She said, bearing down on him, or bearing up, because she was short, but it felt like bearing down. That I haven't made you some dinner? No, he said. It sounded like you were. I wasn't. I was, do you actually expect me to have your dinner ready for you on the table when you get home? No. Do you think I spend the day preparing for your empty stomach? No. Do you

think I have nothing better to do with my time than look after your children? There are children. Yes, she said, are children. And she roughly handed Blake to him. The children we both made together, remember? So now I am going for a swim and you can stay here and look after our children. Blake needs a bath. Don't forget to take Rears' bubbles out of her hair before she goes to bed. And can you listen to the rice? It should be done soon. I'm out of here. She left the room but immediately came back again, realizing she was still holding the dishcloth. If you don't want me to behave like a housewife, she added, don't treat me like one. she slammed the dishcloth down by the sink and was gone

Michael was left in the kitchen with Blake trying to pull off his glasses feeling deflated and misunderstood wondering what she'd meant by listening to the rice he was too afraid to ask her before she left and while she was gone he forgot about the rice entirely apart from once when he looked at it cooking in the pan for a while even bent slightly to put his ear to it acknowledge in its wet, bubbling sound.

It was only later when he smelt burning that he remembered. He ran to the cooker, dismayed, fearful for his future. Melissa returned refreshed by her backstrokes, her shoots from the edge, her wheeling arms and watching the night sky through the slats in the ceiling of the swimming pool, all of which was quickly superseded when she discovered this new failure. listening to rice Michael learned that evening means listening out for when the wet bubbling sound becomes a dry popping sound

and when it does you're supposed to turn off the heat and put the lid on the pan this allows the hot air to do its final intrinsic softening in the house of the rice these were her words thank you this podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish cream.

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I'm Parker, and I've been shortlisted for the silence of the girls. Pat, we have women listening now who, probably dream of becoming writers or have their own book already started. So what's the story behind you deciding to become a writer? Oh, well, I think I decided when I was about 11. Well, I didn't weigh it up and think, well, the money's good and the holiday pays fantastic. And there's such a clear route to the top.

I mean, there are no good reasons for being a writer. The only reason for being a writer is that you've tried to stop it and failed. What do you mean you tried to stop it? Have you ever tried to stop it in felt? Have I ever tried to stop writing? Well, there have been large spaces of time in my life when I had small children when I couldn't write. And what I did in effect was keep going by keeping notebooks and journals. I mean, once you've got that compulsion, you can't be rescued from it. It's just there. So how did you develop as an author, you know, from the seeds of that idea as a child when you were 11 that you want to. wanted to be a writer, how did you develop into becoming the writer you are today?

Slowly. I wasn't published until I was 39, and it wasn't that I hadn't been writing. I'd been trying very hard to get published. But I wasn't writing the right things. I simply hadn't found my own voice. You do sometimes see writers who find their voice with their third or fourth book. And I think that's a pity really because they go through the rest of their working lives, I think, secretly ashamed of their first book, which is so obviously not them. So you have to find your voice. And that means moving out of the shadow of the people you admire. And it means being very honest about who you are and where you're coming from. Well, I come from a rather working class background.

And I was really imitating middle-class sensitive lady novels, which just isn't me at all. So they weren't published and they didn't deserve to be published. So the Silence of the Girls tackles the conflict depicted in the Iliad and your previous books, The Regeneration Trilogy, took on a different war, World War I. So I was curious to know what, what is it about conflict that really interests you as a writer? Well, I think all writers are interested in conflict, whether it's domestic conflict or world war. I'm interested in both because it's impossible

to get the reader involved in a book which has no conflict in it and I think in my own personal case of course I was very much a war baby I didn't know who my father was I was told he had died in the war so the war and the mystery of my identity sort of blended in my mind

it takes on almost like a mythic quality Oh it does yes yes yeah you've talked in previous interviews about the freedom of writing myth with this book versus, you know, the constraints of historical realism with your other books. So when did you first realize you wanted to take on this kind of classic from antiquity versus staying within a relatively contemporary setting of the world wars? In a previous interview, I said that I thought it was about three or four years before I started writing. But then somebody wrote to me and pointed out that the,

There's a passage about the first book of the Iliad in my book, The Life Class, which is 12 years ago now. So the seeds of the idea were present for much longer than I was thinking. And I think, you know, for anybody who wants to write, one of the tips about what you should write, it's not the brilliant, red-hot new idea. It's that awkward little story that has been following you around like a lost puppy for years. that's the one you should fix on and write. How do you figure out which of the awkward puppies that have been following you around?

How do you decide which one you should, I guess, adopt and give it a home? Oh, it does it for you. It's the one that looks most pathetic that whines the loudest. That's the one. I don't know about you, but if I open a novel and the first thing I see is a long quotation, I skip it and go straight to the first chapter.

But in spite of that, tonight I'm going to read the quotation from the beginning of the silence of the girls. It's the human stain by Philip Roth and the situation, all you need to know really is that this is a professor of classics and he's meeting his first student, of the new academic year. You know how European literature begins, he'd ask,

after having taken the role at the first meeting, with a quarrel. The whole of European literature springs from a fight, and then he picked up his copy of the Iliad and read the opening lines. Divine muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles, begin where they first quarreled, Argumemnon, the king of men, and great Achilles.

And what are they quarrelling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It's as basic as a bar-room brawl. They're quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war. So if you follow his advice and take up your copy of the Iliad, what you will find in the opening book is the two violent mighty souls quarrelling, making these immensely long, brilliant, eloquent speeches. And meanwhile, the girl or girls they're quarrelling over say nothing at all. Not a single word.

and so at that point I thought I've got to give these girls a voice I'm not the only person thinking this I know but it was a very powerful feeling this is Bresaeus great Achilles brilliant Achilles shining Achilles godlike Achilles

how the epithets pile up we never called him any of those things we called him the butcher. Swift-footed Achilles. Now there's an interesting one. More than anything else, more than brilliance, more than greatness, his speed defined him. As a story, he once chased the god Apollo

all over the plains of Troy. Cornered at last, Apollo is supposed to have said, you can't kill me, I'm immortal. Ah yes, Achilles replied, but we both know if you weren't immortal, you'd be dead. Nobody was ever allowed the last word, not even a god. I heard him before I saw him, his battle cry ringing round the walls of Linusus. We women, children too, of course, had been told to go to the citadel, taking a change of clothes,

and as much food and drink as we could carry. Like all respectable married women, I rarely left my house. So to be walking down the street, in broad daylight, felt like a holiday. Almost. Under the laughter and cheering and shouted jokes, I think we were all afraid. I know I was. We all knew the men were being pushed back,

the fighting that had once been on the beach and around the harbour, was now directly under the gates. We could hear shouts, cries, the clash of swords on shields, and we knew what awaited us if the city fell. And yet the danger didn't feel real. Not to me at any rate, and I doubt if the others were any closer to grasping it. How was it possible for these high walls that had protected us all our lives? lives to fall.

Thank you. Thank you, Pat. That's so powerful. So I read the Iliad and the stories of Achilles and Troy when I was a child. And of course what you're mainly told of Bresayas is she's beautiful and she's handed over. And I don't think I had the curiosity to think about what do that mean. And it's what really struck me as a line

in the book where she says about what people are going to say about them in the future, that they won't say that we were living in a rape camp. And how important was you to explore this, what happens to women, the unspoken story of what happens to women in war? Yes. I mean, it struck me very forcefully as I was writing the book that absolutely nothing that happens to the women in this story is not happening to women somewhere in the world. The Yazidi women in Syria, but also women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even the very worst things

like boy babies being murdered in front of their mothers and gang rape, all those things are still happening today. And it does make you sort of rather despair, but on the other hand, at least it is now unequivocally illegal.

It's breaching international law. The only out of the time when basically there was no international law. Women were just collateral along the way. fascinating. Well, I mean, I think there were also what was being fought over because fertile women were a scarce commodity and the men needed them. Hi, I'm Tyari Jones and I'm the author of an American marriage. I read an interview with you

and a former student of yours. He said that you told them that they had three years in their writing program to finish a book and they had to finish a book in three years, which is so disciplined. How do you apply that to your own writing process? Well, I don't believe they have to finish the book in three years, but I do believe that they have these three years will probably be the time that they will have dedicated time and don't squander the opportunity. You can't control if you finish a book in a certain amount of time,

but you can control how hard you work toward the goal. That said, I have learned to stop telling people they have to write every day because I realize how many people, are excluded because they have busy lives. They have children. They work. They take care of elderly people. If the only people writing books are the people who can write every day, the people with meaningful lives, everyday working people, would never feel that they can write a book. So now, instead of telling people to write every day, I say write often. What does your own writing process

look like? Do you have certain times the day that you like to write at? Do you have a certain set up in your house or your apartment? Are there things you need around you, like a cup of coffee, to make the creative juices start flowing? Well, I need a cup of coffee to exist. So it's definitely part of the writing process. But when the writing is going well, I don't have any requirements. When the writing is going well, it's like being in love. You can do anything together because you're in love. It's when the writing isn't going well, just like when the love isn't going well, that you need structured kind of date time. So when I'm not feeling inspired to write, I like to work in the morning, I like to have coffee, I like a tidy room, I like to use my Smith Corona typewriter. All these things, the more

things I require is evidence that the work is difficult. But when the work is going well, I could do it on the back of a napkin while riding a bus. It's interesting you mentioned you still have a typewriter. What do you think using a typewriter to write brings to your process? Well, it's very fun. One, it's very rewarding to make all that noise. You feel like you're getting something done and there's that little bing at the end of the line, you know, rewarding you over and over again. But also, when I write on a computer, I'm writing so quickly that I don't know what I've written. It's kind of like when you've eaten a meal so fast, you don't quite remember it. That's how I feel when I compose on a computer, like I'm in a fugue state

is not intentional enough for me, but the typewriter slows me down and is more legible than my handwriting. And I admire, I have about nine manual typewriters, and I just admire them as machines also. I know that you did a lot of research while at Harvard into mass incarceration, which made it into the book. So how did you balance between capturing the actual reality of the issue and having that creative space to make the book your own? Was there stuff you kind of fudge, you kind of fudge, because you knew it would make for a better story? Well, when I did the research, I actually felt paralyzed by it. I was paralyzed by just the terribleness of mass incarceration.

I would find out facts that were so startling. I wanted to somehow animate them in fiction. But I was in a mall in Atlanta, and I heard a couple arguing. And I heard the woman say, Roy, you know you wouldn't have waited on me for seven years. And I looked at her. she looked at me, he looked at me. I felt like all three of us knew he wouldn't have waited on her for seven years. And then he said, I don't know what you're talking about. This wouldn't have

happened to you in the first place. And I felt that he was also right. And when both people are right, that's when you have moral ambiguity. And that's where the novel, the story lives. And so when I leaned into the question of their relationship, the collateral effects of this incarceration, that's when my creativity really came alive because there's no research that can answer that question. That's the question of the heart. It put the research in the background where the story was able to come up. They say that you should write a novel about people and their problems, not problems and their people. The novel is, I think, one of the funniest on the short list. There are real flashes of humor like, you know, ghetto Yoda that come through. And I just wanted to know how important

is keeping that sense of humor and lightness, even though you're talking about very weighty issues? Well, I feel that a novel when it works, it captures the entire range of the experience. And humor is part of the range of a human experience. Sometimes, I think when you're writing about a weighty topic and you want to impress upon your reader the significance of the topic, you're tempted to, like, call the humor out of it because it's almost like if you use humor, then you're suggesting that the problem isn't so serious. But I also think that when you do that, you make the book devastating to people who are living that experience. Can you imagine if you're reading a book about an experience you have lived and it is so bleak, then even though the writer may be raising

awareness about the issue to those who don't know about the issue, for the person living the issue, you're kind of crushing their spirit by leaving out moments of lightness. And I believe that people in trouble laugh, and sometimes people say, oh, they're laughing to keep from crying, but I think that's dehumanizing. They're laughing because they're human beings and human beings laugh. An American marriage is the story of a young couple separated by a wrongful conviction. It is set in the state of Louisiana and the southern United States. I'm going to read for you a scene on the day that Celestial's husband, Roy, is tried for a crime he did not commit. If this doesn't go the way we wanted to, Roy said the day before his trial, I don't want you to wait for me. Keep making art and doing all the things you need to do. This is going to work out, I promised. You didn't do it. I'm looking at so much time, he said. I can't ask you to throw your life away from me. His words and his eyes were speaking two different languages, like someone saying, no, while nodding his head, yes. No one's going to throw anything away, I said.

I had faith in those days. I believed in things. But what I know now is this. They didn't believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word. There in the front of the room, I explained that Roy couldn't have raped the woman in room 206 because we had been together. I told them about the magic fingers that wouldn't work, about the movie that played on the snowy television. The prosecutor asked me what we have been fighting about. Rattled, I looked to Roy and to both are mothers. Banks objected, so I didn't have to answer, but the pause made it appear that I was concealing something rotten at the pit of our very young marriage. Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him. Maybe I wasn't appealing enough, not dramatic enough, too, not from around here. Who knows? Uncle Banks, coaching me, said, now is not the time to be articulate. Now is the time to give it up. No filter, all heart. No matter what you're asked, what you want the jury to see is why you married him. I tried, but I didn't know how to be anything other than well-spoken in front of strangers. I wish I could have brought a selection of

my artwork, all images of Roy. I would say, this is who he is to me. Isn't he beautiful? Isn't he gentle, but all I had were words which are light and flimsy as air. As I took my seat, not even the black lady juror would look at me. It turns out that I watched too much television. I was expecting a scientist to come and testify about DNA. I was waiting for a pair of handsome detectives to burst into the courtroom at the last minute whispering something urgent. Everyone would see that this was a big mistake, a major misunderstanding. We would all be but appeased. I fully believe that I would leave the courtroom with my husband beside me. Secure in our home, we would tell people how no black man is really safe in America.

But 12 years is what they gave him. We would be 43 when he was released. Roy understood that 12 years was in eternity because he sobbed right there at the defendant's table. His knees gave way and he fell into his chair. The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet, up through his torso, and finally through his lips. When a man wails like that, you know it's all the tears he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak all the way up to whatever entered his spirit just last year. As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my

chin, a souvenir of scar tissue. When they did what I remember is kicking in the door, what everyone else remembers is opening it with the key. After the door was open, however it was open, we were both pulled from the bed. They dragged Roy into the parking lot, and I followed, lunging for him, wearing nothing but a white slip. Someone pushed me to the ground, and my chin hit the pavement. My slip rode up showing everything to everyone, and my tooth sank into the soft skin of my bottom lip. Roy was on the asphalt beside me, barely beyond my grasp, speaking words that didn't reach my ears. I don't know how long we lay there, parallel like burial plots. Husband, wife, what God has brought together, let no man tear asunder. Thank you. Marvelous. So, I mean, what's heartbreaking,

isn't it? As you were showing there, is it it all stems from this wrongful arrest. Roy helps a lady out with a broken window in a motel, and then that's it. And, you know, initial, because that happens quite early, one might think, oh, well, you're setting up an equation in which we're going to find out who really did it. But that's not what you're doing, is it? Well, for me, if we have the situation where a man is arrested and in prison for a crime he doesn't commit, the question is, what then do we want to know?

Is what drives us who done it? Or is what drives us what happens to him and his family? Every time someone is wrongfully arrested or arrested period and in prison, that is a family separation. I was interested in those collateral ripples. I felt like if I spent a lot of time saying, well, who did it? How did they catch the real killer? Then it becomes a narrative about the police, about the state. And I wanted this to be a story about a family and a community torn apart by this state-sponsored violence.

And the tragedy of wrongful of us, it's so much. movingly shown. If you've enjoyed this podcast, you can make your support of the women's prize and the outreach work it does official. There is no better time to champion women's voices as the prize approaches its 25th anniversary. So join the women's prize community as a friend for as little as £100. We can find out more information about the benefits on the website, and it's quick and easy to sign up. Just Google, support us, women's prize. My name is Madeline Miller. I'm the author of Circe. I have a background in classics and also in

theatre and I taught Latin and Greek to high school students for many years before coming out with my first novel. You've said in previous interviews that you were five years old when you first heard the opening line of the Iliad and you were pretty much hooked from then on out. So what is it about Greek mythology that captivates you so much? I think it's the, incredible humanity of the stories that even though there are gods and monsters and the emotions are just blown up to, you know, this towering heights that really at their heart these are stories about people. And I love how expansive they are and how there's always another corner to explore that's really exciting. And there's always another perspective that you think you know a character

and then they pop up in this other story and you thought they were the hero and now they're the villain. And so I love how sort of mutable the stories are as well. How did you decide upon using the character as Circe as a way to investigate and interpret these ideas? Did you always feel drawn to her when you read about her in The Odyssey? Or was it something that you went looking for? It was actually anger. The first time I had encountered Circe in the Odyssey, I was incredibly disappointed in the portrait of her. I was angry because I thought, okay, I,

It heard that there was this witch who turned men into pigs. I love Greek mythology. I knew she was coming. It was going to be really interesting. We were going to learn, you know, what it means to be a witch. And basically, you know, she turns Odysseus' men into pigs, and then he confronts her. He pulls his sword on her. She screams, falls to her knees. It's like it's all gone. She's literally groveling at his feet. You know, phallic sword. It's just all of a sudden it becomes very gendered and all her power is gone. She has to be immediately tamed for the hero's story. And so in a sense, I feel like I was sort of being invited to tell her story. It's like, okay, Odysseus is the great liar of ancient literature.

That's his version. But what might Circe's version look like? How might this look if we strip away Odysseus' is, you know, constant self-aggrandizing? You've described Circe's story as the embodiment of male anxiety about female power. So what do you think about this anxiety that makes it echo through the centuries, even, you know, three millennia on? Women with power have always been a source of anxiety to patriarchal cultures, to the men around them, even to women who are dealing with internalized misogyny. What's amazing to me, again, is sort of that timelessness that we still call women witches.

You can choose almost any female politician and Google their name and the word witch, and you will find a horrible wealth of results. So what's amazing to me is how much that anxiety is still in place. And so part of the reason that I wrote Circe is that I wanted to present this complex woman who, yes, she does have power, but is not just this kind of flattened, either the sexy witch, which she is partially represented as in the Odyssey, or the terrifying woman who turns men into pigs because that's just what women do. What would she say motivates your writing beyond, you know, obviously crafting a brilliant book? I think I always want to be bringing to light voices that have not been heard or stories that I feel like have not been told that need to be told. With Song of Achilles, I felt that the idea of Achilles and Patroclus as lovers had basically been forcibly closeted. And I was, again, angry about that.

And that was something I wanted to, you know, represent them as lovers. And I think I'm always animated by this desire to put a story out in the world that I don't see there. why do you think you decided that being an author was something you wanted to do? The strange thing is, so I've been loving classics since I was a child, as you mentioned, but I have also been loving writing since I was a child. And I actually found this time capsule that I wrote when I was 13, where I had sort of confessed to myself that the thing I most wanted to do was tell stories. And then I had literally sealed it up and an envelope and hidden it away for 20 years.

So that was sort of my relationship to wanting to be a writer. I really wanted to do it, but I felt like I couldn't claim that. For actually some of the same reasons that I think a lot of women struggle to claim their voice and claim that they have the right to tell a story. They have the right to tell their story or to speak out in the world. How did you begin to start feeling like you could exercise ownership over these classics? Because it's obviously such a huge part of literature. How did you work up the courage, I guess, to take on these stories and make them your own?

You know, I had a lot of fears about it. with Song of Achilles. I actually did not tell any of my classics peers that I was working on Song of Achilles for the entire 10 years I was working on it. I kept sort of asking myself that question of who am I, how dare I? And then at some point I just got over it. I just decided, why not me? Why not? And you know, this idea of retelling stories, particularly in the classics, I mean, this is what humans do. We retell stories. Homer himself, if he even was a person, comes out of oral tradition, you know, people telling and retelling and shaping and reshaping these stories. And as soon as the Iliad and Odyssey existed, they were being told and retold by, you know,

Escalis and Sophocles and then by Avicles and by Virgil and by James Joyce and by Margaret Avwood. And so, you know, this history of retelling and retelling is part of human history. And why not me? Hello? Sircy in Greek mythology is most well known for appearing in Homer's Odyssey, where she turns Odysseus's men into pigs. She is the daughter of the sun god Helios, which makes her a goddess, a nymph, the lowest of the low. But what really drew me to her is that she's not just a goddess, she is also a witch. And she is born a goddess, but she makes herself into a witch. So the two passages I'm going to read,

I'm going to read two very short pieces. The first is soon after she has been exiled from her father's halls and she has found herself on her magical island of Ayaya, which is where she will eventually encounter Odysseus, and she is just discovering her witchcraft. Let me say what sorcery is not. It is not divine power which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out,

dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail as gods do not. If my herbs are not fresh enough, if my attention falters, if my will is weak, the drafts go stale and rancid in my hands. By rights, I should never have come to witchcraft. God's hate all toil, it is their nature. The closest we come is weaving or smithing,

but these things are skills and there is no drudgery to them since all the parts that might be unpleasant are taken away with power. The wool is dyed not with stinking vats and stirring spoons but with a snap. There is no tedious mining, the oars leap willing from the mountain. No fingers are ever chafed, no muscles strained. Witchcraft is nothing but such drudgery. Each herb must be found in its den, harvested at its time, grubbed up from the dirt, culled and stripped, washed and prepared.

It must be handled this way than that to find out where its power lies. Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? Why did none of us mind? I cannot speak for my brothers and sister, but my answer is easy. for a hundred generations I had walked the world, drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will as a bow is bent for an arrow.

I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought, this is a little. is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt. The second passage comes more towards the middle of the novel after Circe has already started turning men into pigs. And he in this passage is Odysseus. He asked me once, why pigs? We were seated before my hearth in our usual chairs.

He liked the one draped in cowhide with silver inlaid in its carvings. Sometimes he would rub the scrolling absently beneath his thumb. Why not? I said. He gave me a bare smile. I mean it, I would like to know. I knew he meant it. He was not a pious man, but the seeking out of things hidden. This was his highest worship. There were answers in me. I felt them buried deep as last year's bulbs growing fat. Their roots tangled with those moments I had spent against the wall, when my lions were gone, and my spells shut up inside me. after I changed a crew, I would watch them, scrabbling and crying in the sty,

falling over each other, stupid with their horror. They hated it all. Their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split-trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the earth's muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men used to mitigate. the world.

Come, I would say to them. It's not that bad. You should appreciate a pig's advantages. Mud slick and swift, they are hard to catch. Low to the ground, they cannot easily be knocked over. They are not like dogs. They do not need your love.

They can thrive anywhere on anything, scraps and trash. They look witless and dull, which lulls their enemies, but they are clever. they will remember your face. They never listened. The truth is, men make terrible pigs.

I'm Zincet and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, produced by Fremantle and brought to you by Bailey's. You definitely want to click subscribe because in our next episode, we will be there for the minute our winner is announced. Please rate and review this podcast. It's the easiest way to help spread the word about the talents you've heard from today. Thanks very much for listening and see you at the award ceremony.