Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S2 Ep11: 2020 Shortlist Special

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

In this special episode of the podcast, Zing Tsjeng welcomes the six incredible authors who have been shortlisted for this year’s Prize: Bernardine Evaristo, Angie Cruz, Natalie Haynes, Jenny Offill, Maggie O’Farrell and Hilary Mantel. They discuss the inspirations behind their novels and tell us what it would mean to win the Women's Prize for Fiction. The 2020 shortlist is as follows: Dominicana by Angie Cruz Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell Weather by Jenny Offill The 25th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced on Wednesday 9th September.  The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world. This series will take you behind the scenes throughout 2020 as we explore the history of the Prize in its 25th year. Sit back and enjoy. This podcast is produced by Bird Lime Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. 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, your host for Season 2 of the Women's Prize podcast, coming to you every fortnight throughout 2020. And you've joined me for a very special episode to celebrate this year's Women's Prize for Fiction shortlisted authors. Welcome to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast.

In this episode, we'll be hearing from the six incredible authors who have been shortlisted for this year's prize, Bernardine Everisto, Angie Cruz, Natalie Haynes, Jenny O'Fell, Maggie O'Farrell and Hilary Mantel. As we're still in lockdown conditions instead of meeting up in person, we'll hear from our six shortlisted authors from the comfort of their own homes. So please forgive us if we sound a little different. We'll also give you a flavour of their nominated books. We begin with Benadine Everisto, who is nominated for the prize for her eighth novel, Girl, Woman, Other. It is a vibrant journey through the lives and loves of 12 very different

characters who are mostly women, black and British. Benadine Everisto, welcome to the Women's Prize podcast. Yeah, hello. Good to talk to you. Congratulations on being on the short list. I'm absolutely thrilled to be on the short list. It's quite an odd time in the current state to be on a short list. How are you dealing with lockdown? You know, I have to look after my mother, who's not well. So that's taking up some of my time. So I don't feel that I'm completely cut off.

But the rest of the time, and I'm at home with my husband, living in suburbia, it's all right. You know, it's very peaceful, very calm, very quiet. I wanted to start by asking. The book has 12 characters and most of them are black British women and their voices are interwarven in a beautiful way throughout the novel. Why did you think it was so important to centre the voices of black women in the book? Well, you know, I feel that if we don't write our stories, nobody's going to do it for us and that's been proven.

And as a writer, it's my eighth book and I've been writing about the African diaspora ever since I started writing professionally, which actually was for theatre in the 1980s. and I was always about wanting to put those stories to the forefront in the arts because we were so absent then and also pretty absent now actually. So when I started this book, which took five years to write, I was just fed up about the fact that so few of our stories were out there in fiction. And so I decided to write a book that would have as many Black British women as possible in it.

And actually, you know, at the beginning I had the idea, that I would have a thousand characters. Now, that may sound really crazy. And actually, it is really crazy. But I thought, well, you know, my background's as a poet, and you can cover an autobiogram with poetry. But I soon whittled that down to 100. I thought 100 would be an amazing number.

And then as I started to write the book, I realized that, you know, I couldn't even write 100 characters. So it then became 12, which felt to me to be a kind of a large enough number to explore a range of different experiences of black British women. And I think one of the things that I really appreciated reading the book is that there is also that emphasis on British women, so they are black British women.

Was it important to you to make sure that that was part of their central identity as characters? Absolutely. I feel that British stories have been overlooked in favour of other stories from other parts of the world. and that in terms of the kinds of books that are published here that represent black women, they have, I think, been more African-American and African-than-British. And while we have had a few exceptions, they certainly haven't in any way been more than a number of writers on two hands. I first encountered Tony Morrison in the early 80s, Alice Walker, Gloria Nala, Audre Lord. And they were incredible, wonderful writers writing out of the African-American.

experience and they were coming to the four as strongly uncompromising female voices, but they weren't our voices. Our history is different. Our culture is different. And I just have felt ever since then, in fact, that it's so important to foreground the unique specificity of being British in this country. What do you think it is about the Black British female experience that? that differs from the African-American experience. And also the African experience. So, you know, Africa obviously is a continent of, I think it's 53 countries,

over a billion people, a primarily black continent. And African-American society, I think it's about 10% of the American population. So the African-American culture and communities are massive, compared to what we have here. You know, in terms of black British women, there are probably under a million of us. So we are a really small minority in a country of something like 67 million people.

And we never seem to reach critical mass. And our voices are overlooked. And the unique experience is that, you know, we have our roots in all the 30-plus countries of the Caribbean, and we have our roots in the, you know, 53 countries of Africa, plus routes in other parts of the world. and I'm a second-generation black British person.

There are now third and fourth generation black British people. At the same time, we're living in a patriarchal society, a patriarchal world. And so we're dealing with issues around gender, as well as issues around culture and race, and never really having a big enough platform to explore who we are and to be a voice in this society. And I think one of the things the book does so well is that it brings this, real diversity and variety of voices. And I was really interested when you said you'd planned initially for a hundred voices and then you whittled them down.

I mean, how do you even get around the process of whittling down those voices? So I had this sort of overarching ambition to have, say, 100 characters. I began with one character and that character led to another character and led to another character. And so it was a very organic process. all of the characters are responding to certain kinds of invisibilities and stereotypes. And I just wanted to explore and expand the scope of who we are as women in this society. And so that meant that I would have to have women on the queer spectrum.

I would have to have women coming from different classes and moving into different classes. I would have to have urban women and also rural women. And then I would have to have women from Africa or the Caribbean. I'd have to have women having different occupations and women engaging in different life journeys and struggles and relationships and family backgrounds and so on. You've called the book Fusion Fiction. Could you just explain how you see that term? I was trying to work out what I'd done with the book because it uses unorthodox punctuation, put it mildly, very few full stops. Lots of commas. There is one. what I call a pro poetic patterning on the page,

which means that it kind of looks a bit like poetry, but it's not poetry. I don't consider the book to be written in poetry, but perhaps it utilizes some of the devices of poetry. And fusion fiction seemed to me the most apposite term to describe it. I think I've made that term up, at least as it pertains to this book. And it allows me to do all kinds of things with the text

that I don't think I'd be able to do if I was writing a traditional novel. So with each woman, I allocated them about 30 pages each, and I'm able to go backwards and forwards into their past and into the present. I am inside them, but I'm also looking at them from the outside. And also there's a level of stream of consciousness that's also happening with the text. And then they're kind of then fusing into each other. It was for me a very free-flowing writing experience and hopefully a very free-flowing reading experience that, breaks the rules of what fiction is supposed to look like.

And here's an extract from the audio book for your listening pleasure. Amma is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city. A few early morning barges cruise slowly by. To her left is the nautical themed footbridge with its deck-like walkway and sailing mast pylons. To her right is the bend in the river as it heads east past Waterloo Bridge towards the dome of St Paul's. She feels the sun begin to rise, the air still breezy before the city clogs up with heat and fumes.

A violinist plays something suitably uplifting further along the promenade. Amher's play, the last Amazon of Dahomey, opens at the National Tonight. She thinks back to when she started out in theatre, when she and her running mate Dominique developed a reputation for heckling shows that offended their political stuff. sensibilities. Their powerfully trained actor voices projected from the back of the stools before they made a quick getaway. They believed in protest that was public, disruptive, and downright annoying to those at the other end of it. She remembers pouring a pint of beer

over the head of a director whose play featured semi-naked black women running around on stage behaving like idiots before doing a runner into the back streets of Hammersmith howling. I was actually really thrilled to see that the book has been optioned as a TV series. What can you tell me about that? Yeah, a television series. It's extremely exciting. If it goes ahead, you never know. It's a little bit scary.

The thing that excites me the most is the fact that there are at least 12 primarily black British characters to be cast. Yeah. And so we'll see what happens there. Yeah, fingers crossed. Finally, what would winning the women's prize mean to you? Oh, well, you know, I've followed the prize since it started. It's always been a really important prize,

and it's maintained its reputation and its respect all these years. I know that I am very blessed at the moment, obviously, but yeah, it's a great prize, and it would be just lovely to have it on my mental piece. And hopefully we would see you at the party. Hopefully there is a party. It wouldn't be the Women's Prize without a party. Absolutely, yeah.

Now we head to New York to chat to Angie Cruz in her nominated book, Dominicana. Her third novel is an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a female immigrant. I started by asking Angie how she was feeling after 11 weeks in New York lockdown. I think I'm doing okay. I feel safe and healthy and just, just trying to stay optimistic. Yeah, I think that's the best that any of us can do at this current situation. Yes. So congratulations on getting onto the short list.

Oh, I am so happy. I read that you were inspired to write Dominicana based on your own mother's experience, right? Yes, that is correct. Which part of your mother's story specifically spoke to you? Well, my mother, she came to the United States in the 1970s. She was also 15 and married to a man twice her age by her mom. mother and father with a desire for, you know, a possibility for a visa to come to the United States for the whole family. So that part is true of the novel. But, you know, in the end, I don't

write nonfiction. I write fiction. So pretty much all of the novel is fiction. I wanted to write a story that was going to reveal the gaps and silences of what was being told to me throughout my lifetime, about my family story. Right. I come from an immigrant background as well. And there's always this weird withholding with your parents where they're not telling you the full story. So you're getting little nuggets out of them. And when you're older, you're able to piece it together so much better than when you did when you were a kid. Yeah, of course. And I think especially for women, all women. You know, we live in a mostly, largely patriarchal, misogynist sexist society that has so much systemic oppression and challenges that we face constantly inside of our

homes, within our families, in the world we live in. And they become normalized in a way that they don't seem even interesting to anyone else. You would think they're not interesting. And I think that it's very difficult to talk about trauma. It's very difficult to talk about things that happen that we forget or we try to forget so we can keep going. And I think that, you, you know, you know, having a daughter as a writer who's asking lots of questions all the time, it was interesting to me to see how my mother would say, oh, this is, it's such a typical story right about something else. So what I had to do in order to write the novel was interview countless women

that lived in New York City in the 60s and 70s and listened to their arrival stories, listen to what they weren't saying, trying to piece together, map together like a New York from all these stories and photographs that I looked at. And did any of those women that you interviewed or spoke to, do any of them particularly stand out in your memory? You know, one of them that stood out is of a neighbor that I have who talked about her first year, she came alone to New York City,

and she was working at a factory. And she said that the hardest moment for her during the day was lunchtime, that she just never looked forward to it. And I thought, you know, like you would think that when you get a break, that's the moment that you would look forward to. But for her, that moment was the moment that she missed her family incredibly because Meals was the moment that all the family came together.

And she said that the missing became unbearable on her days off. And I found this to be true for many of the women I talked to. Food is such a bridge to people's culture, especially, you know, their heritage and their memories and what gives them comfort. Yes. That's why food became such a prominent, vehicle for Anna to use her creativity, but also to hold on to what she remembered of her home. The book was 10 years in the making. Did you ever get kind of frustrated with your progress?

Like, were you always, you know, dead certain that out of the end of this, there was going to come a book? You know, when I started the book, I moved to Texas from New York City. And I myself felt very estranged in that land being a New Yorker. And I also felt this huge distance from the community that I grew up in and I knew really well. And I wanted to close that canyon, you know, that I felt between myself and my family. And this was one way to do it. It was like banging my head against the wall because the book was so heavy. The themes are really heavy. And it took me a number of years to reread the book as a fiction book, not as something that actually happened to anyone. And to give the characters their own space, you know, sometimes when you're looking at

outside of a situation to someone you love, you can't imagine what it's like to be in a situation where they're trapped and facing domestic violence. But the truth is, even in very difficult situations, there's a lot of moments of joy. In order for me to rewrite that book and give Anna those moments that she's truly a teenager and she's feeling joyous and she's pursuing her desire, it took a lot of time. I know there's been a lot of debate in the book world about who gets tell what stories. So like what qualifies people to write from certain perspectives that they might not themselves share? How do you feel about that debate? Because you've clearly put so much of your own heritage and your own history and research about your own community into this book.

I think that this conversation wouldn't be so significant if there was more representation of diverse voices and literature. I think that what has been revealed, now that we have all this data and people counting numbers on who gets reviewed, who gets prizes, who gets published, is that, you know, women, one, have been marginalized around those things, but then also women of color and people of color, those stories are not always represented. You know, I think because there are so few books coming out by writers' own voices and representing their own story, it does sort of put pressure and weight on those stories in a way that I think that if we had more of them, we would all be more free or feel more free to do whatever we want.

One of the things that stands out in the books is that, you know, there's, you can read it and you can feel that kind of research and you can feel that kind of history that the book is coming from. But, you know, how much artistic license you give yourself to kind of deviate from, you know, this research and these historical points that you've given yourself. in the book. Well, with this book, I gave myself all the artistic license. You know, I spent a lot of time reading poetry because I was very interested in manipulating the language to convey a feeling or kind of that silence, that withholding, as you mentioned earlier, I wanted to sort of, you know, be explicit about certain things that are happening in the community, but I also want it to give the narrative space like poetry does, right? That white space on the page. So, the reader could also feel the thing that's happening.

And here's an extract from the audiobook of Dominicana. The first time Juan Ruiz proposes, I'm 11 years old, skinny and flat-chested. I'm half asleep. My frizzy hair has busted out from a rubber band, and my dress is on backwards. Every other weekend, Juan and three of his brothers show up past midnight all the way from La Capital

to serenate the good country girls in the area who are eligible for marriage. They're not the first men to stop by and try at me and my older sister Teresa. For years, people stare at me, almost against their will. I'm different than other girls, by no means pretty.

A curious beauty, people say, as if my green eyes are shinier, more valuable to be possessed. Because of this, Mama fears that she doesn't plan my future, my fate will be worse than Teresa's, who already has her brown eye on El Guardia, who guards the municipal building in the center of town.

That night, the first out of many. Three of the Ruiz brothers parked their car on the dirt road and clang of papas cul-mado's bell as if they're herding cows. What do people like your mother make of the book? Has she read it? Yes, my mother read the book and she really loved it. But one of the things she said that just, like, really disarmed me in a good way, she said, you know, I'm reading the book and it's not what happened to me.

This is not my story. She's like, I know this. But it's as if all these memories happened to me. I just forgot that I had them. She's like, it feels like what happened to me. That's powerful. Oh, my God. I was just like, that's what I wanted.

I wanted to be closer to her and I wanted her to see that I saw her. Even if we can never talk about these things because we never ever talked about, you know, the situation that she was in for most of, her marriage. I get so many letters from all over Europe and Australia from women who are saying to me, I'm not Dominican, but, you know, my grandfather, who was finished, you know, I heard these stories from my grandmother and this is her story. It's just amazing to think that there is something that we all have in common and we should

be rallying around like the protection and vulnerability of young girls. We have to do it, you know, and I think this book is uncomfortable sometimes. But I do think that we need to have this conversation first starting inside our homes, which is the hardest place to have it. Like I've had a lot of readers who say, I read this book and I bought it from my sister because I think this is what's happening to her inside her house. Wow. So that way she can talk to me about it through Anna. Yeah, I mean, if there's one thing that literature is really good at, it's providing people with a way to talk about difficult, complicated situations and feelings. Yes.

So, I mean, it sounds like you've already had an amazing response just from being on the long list and the short list of the women's prize with readers getting in touch. But I just wanted to know, you know, what would winning the prize mean to you? You know, I feel already so privileged that I'm in company with writers like Hillary Mendel and Jenny O'Fell and Burmanteen Abarista. Like, I just feel so privileged to even be in like any kind of conversation. The fact that a book called Dominicana about the immigrant experience when immigration is such a contentious topic right now, and it's something that's not going to go away, to see it front and center showing up, I don't even know what to say. It's great. If I win, oh my God.

I mean, I don't know. I hope it inspires other people to, like, write these stories. Now we delve into classicist and comedian Natalie Hay. his third novel, A Thousand Ships, which retails the Trojan War from an all-female perspective. Natalie Haynes, welcome to the Women's Prize podcast. Thank you. How are you doing? I am all right.

Thank you for asking. All right is just about as much as I expect or probably, you know, I'm good for in this current time period. I think that's okay, isn't it? Let's just aim low and live down to those expectations. That's always my goal. Yeah, exactly. Congratulations on getting shortlisted for the women's prize. Yeah, exceeded those expectations. Ah, the whole system's falling apart straight away.

So a thousand ships is a retelling of the children war from a women's perspective. From all of the women's perspectives, yeah. I wanted to write an epic novel. And you've done something similar with the Oedipus story in your previous book. Yeah, the Children of Jakasta is my retelling of the Oedipus myth, as it's more usually known. With ships, I wanted to tell an epic. I wanted to do my version of a huge epic poem. I wanted to tell. the story of a whole war, not how it affected one family, one woman, one small group of women, but all the women, the women of Troy, whose city is destroyed, the women who are waiting for their Greek husbands, brothers, fathers, sons to come home. I wanted to do the goddesses who are the cause of the war. I wanted to do the Amazon warriors who fight in the war. So, yeah, it was an attempt to make an epic story that had women at every stage of it as its focal characters,

because I realised I couldn't think of a book which had done that with this myth that I'd been reading one way or another since I was, I don't know, a child, I suppose. Yeah, chips is my heart song. That's a lovely way of describing a novel, a heart song. Yeah, and it nearly kills you to write that. It was worth it. I'm not a classicist like you are, and I was wondering, I never shock horror. I can't believe this. I was spoken to other not classicists before it's been okay. Okay, well, I'm glad to hear it because the thing that I kind of take away from, you know, the classics is that it's very male dominated. Is that accurate, you know, in terms of the epics as well? Yes, it is.

The vast majority of literature that we have from the ancient world, I mean, obviously the vast majority of literature from the age of world is lost between 97 and 99% probably. What we have surviving, the vast majority of it was written by an elite group of men. Men who are rich enough to be literate for the most part. Obviously there's more of a debate with the older epics, things like Homer. Those poems were partly made in an oral culture. They predate literacy. But there's absolutely no known record of a rhapsode, a performing bard, being a woman at all, they're only men, as far as we know. There are exceptions.

The Iliad is a very male-dominated narrative because it is the story of war and the story of war. largely on the battlefield, but partly in Troy where there are very many more female characters. You sometimes have as many as four in a book. It's pretty radical. The Odyssey is a much more, has many more female characters in it, so much so that when the writer Samuel Butler was discussing the Odyssey in the 19th century, he suggested that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman because there were so many, you know, complicated female characters in it. I'm not quite sure which male writers of his time he was reading to draw that conclusion, but I feel confident it could have been looks around oh any of them um classics is historically and and to an extent still today is a

male dominated field and sometimes the work that we have lost is just devastating you know we have three poems that survive by sappho virtually in their entirety and the rest is just fragments she wrote nine books of lyric poetry but but we don't have it um it can be a little heart-breaking being a feminist classicist some days but the truth of it is of course that that there are these incredible stories with these incredible female characters which have been largely, if not ignored, then certainly overlooked.

And there's so much scope to take these names and these kind of fragments of stories and turn them into people, characters to whom everything happens, you know, to make them the focal point of the story, it's an intoxicating combination for a novelist, classicist, I can't lie to you. So I'm assuming that's what draws you

to writing stories or retelling these stories from the angle and perspective of women? Yes, always. I mean, women are the same thing as people. I feel like I've been saying it my whole life, but it's still true. Women are the same thing as people. You're going to be surprised how many stories we can have.

It's like, hey, guys, look over here. I know, it's mad, isn't it? But that's very much how it feels to me. I'm still happy to watch an entirely male-focused narrative if it's completely extraordinary. If it's as good as Sophocles-Filok-Tis, I am here for that narrative. But do you know what?

There's quite a lot that aren't as good as Sophoclese's Philoctetes. And I probably don't need very many more of those very male-focused, quite good narratives in my life when there are so many stories that I just haven't heard, don't know in the same ways. How did you know which voices to include in ships? You know, were there some women you wanted to include or some women you sadly had to lose on the cutting room floor? Yeah, there were. I thought I would be able to do all of the women of the Odyssey and all the women of Eliad and all the women that I wanted to tell. who were in the build-up to the war and in the aftermath of the war,

I thought it would be possible to do every single woman. And it's just not. There are literally dozens, probably hundreds. There are a lot of changes of voice and perspective in ships, and it moves forwards and backwards through time. It moves among the Greeks and the Trojans through mortals and immortals. I think maybe it would have been asking a bit too much, even of my extremely patient and clever readers to ask them to add in another five or ten more voices.

I don't think it was short of them. But yeah, no, I loved writing the goddesses because they're also monstrous. They're also totally amoral. You don't get to write women like that very often. I obviously nicked that from Euripides because I'm not an idiot. You should always nick for the best. Are there any little-known kind of female figures from antiquity that you wish more people knew about? I think you mentioned, I'm probably going to butcher her name completely because I'm very bad at remembering names.

Panthus, Pantholia. Yeah, Panthusoleus. Everyone should know about her. And there's not really a good reason for why they aren't. You know, we do have a text about Pentheselaya. We have Quintus Meneas's Fall of Troy. I felt like that about virtually every woman in this book. I thought, you know, people will know Helen really well, but they probably won't know, as you say, Pantheselaire or Laodomere. Most people aren't classicists.

Most people don't get to study classics at school. I tried never to assume that people knew stuff before I embarked on a chapter because I felt like it would be a bit lazy and also a bit rude to make those kind of assumptions. I tried to behave as though all these characters were being introduced to you, I hope, you know, in some cases for the first time, but I tried to treat them all equally. I think that definitely does work in the novel because, you know, as I was reading it, I have never read any of the classics. I mean, I've read Sappho, but not.

I mean, if you're only going to read one, that's not a terrible choice you've made there in my view. And now for an extract from the audiobook of a thousand ships. Sing, muse, he says, and the edge in his voice makes it clear that this is not a request. If I were minded to accede to his wish, I might say that he sharpens his tone on my name like a warrior drawing his dagger across a wetstone preparing for the morning's battle. But I am not in the mood to be amused today. Perhaps he hasn't thought of what it is like to be me. Certainly he hasn't. Like all poets, he thinks only of himself. But it is surprising that he hasn't considered how many other men there are

like him, every day, all demanding my unwavering attention and support. How much epic poetry does the world really need? Every conflict joined, every war fought, every city besieged, every town sacked, every village destroyed, every impossible journey, every shipwreck, every homecoming, these stories have all been told and countless times. Can he really believe he has something new to say? And does he think he might need me to help him keep him? track of all his characters or to fill those empty moments where the meter doesn't fit the

tail. You're also a comedian. I'm probably right in saying you're the only comedian slash novelist we've had on the podcast so far. Oh, good. I like to be niche. How do you think your comedic skills relate to you being a novelist or do you view them as quite separate things? I'm not sure they do. I mean, they make it very easy to go out and sell a book. That's just true. And so for somebody like me who spent 12 years on the stand-up circuit, that is a fun, easy job. I love doing it. But I've feel like I have to put that side of me away when I'm writing fiction. I find it very hard to do them both in the same day. It is really difficult to maintain them both, but they are both part of who I am.

I hope that the bits of ships that are funny are funny and the bits that are heart-wrenching or heart-wrenching. And I kind of think, well, I think we are all maybe a little capable of all those sides of our characters. When my next book comes out in the autumn, Pandora's Jar, that'll be more books than stand-up shows that I've written. It'll be book six and I only did five shows at the Edinburgh fringe. And I still feel really like a comedian who's getting away with this. So I'm not quite sure I'm going to feel when I have to acknowledge that actually this has been a bigger part of my life

than comedy was. So if you do win the women's prize, how would you feel about that? What would it mean to you? It would be incredible. This is incredible. Are you kidding me? Being on the short list is incredible. Being on the long list was incredible. Winning would be incredible. I can't really talk about this without crying. The whole thing has been so overwhelming. This book came quite close to destroying me when I was writing it. And now it feels like the rope I'm using to pull myself through this year. I feel very complicated feelings about this book and absolute overwhelming joy about it being on the women's pro short. So whatever happens, I already feel like I won the lottery about 1,000 times over.

You're listening to a special episode of the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, where we're speaking to this year's shortlisted authors. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish cream. Bailey's is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bailey's is a perfect adult treat, whether in coffee, over ice cream or paired with your favourite book.

Official announcement, sunshine is coming our way. Celebrate the changing seasons and the sweet taste of spring with a baileys on ice alongside your favourite shortlisted book. Or if you'd prefer a vegan treat, try Baileys Almand for the delicate taste of almond with a blend of real vanilla. Next up, we head back to America to chat to Jenny Offel about her novel Weather. The book is a follow-up to her bestseller, Department of Speculation, and demonstrates a powerful portrait of climate anxiety. I caught up with her to find out more and began by asking how she was in these strange times. I'm doing okay. I feel like time is very strange, very elastic, and I'm trying to get used to that. But the movement between tedium and terror is very strange in these days.

I feel like you're either sort of bored or you're terrified. and there's not much in between. Oh, I totally know what you mean. And I feel like weather is the perfect kind of soundtrack book to what's happening. Because I feel like one of the things that communicates so well is that ambient dread that is so kind of common to us nowadays. It is a little funny because when I was writing the book and also when I was first talking about it when it came out before the pandemic, I would say, I just feel like the sort of most, motivating emotion of this book was anticipatory dread or kind of ambient dread. And sometimes people would kind of cock their heads and look at me a little bit like,

huh, anticipatory dread, what's that? And I think we all know very well what it is now. That sort of sense of something coming down the pike that you can't quite make out the shape of, but you know it's quite bad. Seems to be something we've all gotten used to if you can get used to it. I mean, the book's been praised for the portrayal of the climate crisis, but also for your protagonist's slow journey towards the realization of what this dread is and what it actually means for her life and the people that she loves.

How did you first get interested in writing a novel about these themes? When I was very much starting out with the book, I think I was thinking about it as a book about the dread of getting older and losing things and things sort of falling away from your life. But very soon I started to realize that there was a kind of a quiet hum of dread that was more existential that was going on with me. And it did have to do with what was happening in the news. And also with a series of conversations I'd had over really 10 years probably with my friend Lydia Millett, who's a novelist and also a conservationist. And one of the initial questions was I wasn't sure why I believed and understood all this abstractly but didn't feel it. So in a way, the novel was a way to feel it, which perhaps I went a bit too far because there were parts of writing this book where I was sort of curled up in a fetal position on my bed. I was feeling it too much.

Right. And how did you get to the point of researching this so thoroughly? Because I mean, a lot of it is based in scientific fact. Yes. It's an interesting thing that I think people who deal with climate communication are always talking about is that people will say, well, there's always been. people saying it was the apocalypse. There's always been people saying the end is near. Well, this time it's scientists and this time it's math telling us that. And that has a very strange effect because it isn't a particular religious sect that is telling us, change your ways now, get right with the Lord or it's the apocalypse. It's actually something that you can look at in graphs and in papers. And in a way, research is the way in to understanding it. Lizzie is, you know, to me very pointedly made a librarian because, you know, the library is a space for this

repository of free knowledge and it's accessible to everyone. I mean, did you have a deliberate kind of goal in mind when you picked Lizzie's occupation? Was she always going to be a librarian? She was always going to be a librarian, partly because I think I just love libraries and librarians and always have since I was a kid. But I wanted to put her in a place where all sorts of people from all walks of life would cross her path. One of the things, at least in America, is that as our social systems have continued to fray and been taken apart, libraries of one of the last spaces that people can go and be in a non-commercial space where people are there to help them, where it's a safe place to be, and there's all sorts of ways for them to research or learn about whatever it is that they're

trying to change in their life. So it felt like an apt place, too. I've seen several reviews that kind of describe this quality to your work that is almost like it's a Zen co-end. So it's like really paired back. It's really minimal. How do you construct these paragraphs and how do you construct these pages? Do you write in excess and you cut it back? Or does it kind of flow out into a page naturally that minimal? I would say it's more the latter. I never tend to be someone that writes very long passages before I cut it back. I'm always sort of thinking at the sentence level until quite laid in a book when I start to try to pull back and have more of a bird's eye view.

One of the things that I actually do have an excessive amount of is I take huge amounts of notes for any book that I write. So there's probably 400 pages of notes that didn't go in this book. I just think to myself, you know, what is the one thing in this long, dense paragraph that really is standing out to me? And then how might I just put that into a sentence? So that's kind of the process. It's almost like, I don't know who it was. It was some sculptor. her talking about, you know, believing that there was already something in there that was a perfect form that you just had to chip away until you got to. So I'm more of a remover than a putter in her. I love that image. So kind of like you look at the block of clay or the blank page and you're

like, there's a book in there. I'm just going to chip away at it until I find it. Right. It's interesting hearing you describe this writing process, especially in context of a book about, you know, the climate crisis because it's almost like I feel like communicating about the climate crisis has the opposite intention in that there's so much information out there. And it's very hard for people to kind of get to the heart of what the situation is. There's a sense of being overwhelmed once you first begin to try to learn about it. Because not only is the science quite difficult that you have to learn, but it's a problem that affects so many people and so many places in such different ways. And I was surprised I remember to learn that it was called

the formal term, I think, that sociologists used for it is a, it's a wicked problem, meaning it has so many different parts that you can't separate them out and, you know, come up with a clean or elegant solution. It's always going to have a wickedness to it. And I sort of felt that way when I was working on it, that there was a density and a complexity to it that made me actually want to write it as lucidly and as pared down as possible so that we didn't just fall into the kind of thicket of facts. And here's an extract from weather for you to check out. In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in.

There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. bucket of black paint, it means. I spend some time pulling books for the doomed adjunct. He has been working on his dissertation for 11 years. I give him reams of copy paper, binder clips and pens. He is writing about a philosopher I have never heard of. He is minor but instrumental, he told me.

Minor but instrumental. But last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you're doing right now making money, it said? There's a line that really struck me in your book about a young woman who asked Sylvia, the professor and podcaster in a lecture, how do you maintain your optimism? I think, you know, I have a little website that goes along with the book, Obligatory Note of Hope, and one of the things I put in it were what I call tips for trying times.

And one of them, which I think sort of speaks to this question, was from something Vaclav Havel wrote in Disturbing the Peace, which I captioned, Be Hopeful, Not Optimistic. If you don't mind, I'll just read a little bit of it. I happen to have it here. This is sort of how he was talking about it, I guess, in political terms. But for me, it was useful in all of this. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well. but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. And I think the reason I like that is that it points us less towards outcomes, desired outcomes, and more towards meaning making. I do feel like the kind of fatalism that sometimes arises once you know all the facts.

It's very seductive, but to me, it's another form of denial. And I think it's a form of hubris to continue to believe that we know how it's all going to fall apart. I think there are so many people doing amazing, small and large things working on this wicked problem. And that does make me hopeful. So what would winning the women's prize mean to you? Well, it would be so exciting and fun. It is such an amazing list that everyone I've shown the list to is sort of like, wow, well, you're lucky to be on it. So I can't say I'm letting myself have too many daydreams about it.

And it's one of those prizes that over the years I would say, see the list of and go out and read the books on. And I was always just so pleased with the range of it and the choice of it and that so many truly innovative and interesting and diverse writers have been on it. It's just kind of thrilling to be out there in the world on that same list. And I'm really, really hoping to come to London. That would be wonderful if that happens. Maggie O'Farrell is one of Britain's most acclaimed and popular contemporary fiction writers. Her nine books include After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and The Hand That First Held Mine. Her latest novel, Hamnet, is the tragic story behind Shakespeare's famous play.

She spoke to me from her home, during a break from homeschooling her children. Maggie O'Farrow, welcome to the Women's Prize podcast. Thank you very much for having me. It's a very gorgeous day, so it's a pleasure to be sitting here in a sun. How have you been doing in lockdown? Well, it's not too bad. You know, there are five of us. I've got my youngest child is seven, so there's quite a lot of homeschooling going on. So it's, yeah, I mean, there are good things about it and there are really challenging things about it, just for everybody else. But we're really

lucky to have a garden. I kind of thank my lucky stars for that every single day. I don't know how people are coping with young kids cooped up in a flat, you know, with no garden. So Hamnet, obviously, is based on the real life William Shakespeare's son. But I'm really curious to know how you first found out about the existence of the sun? Well, I first heard about the boy Hamnut a really long time ago, actually, is when I was studying a play Hamlet for my Scottish hires, so I was about 16 going on 17. And I really loved to play.

It really got under my skinner, as I think it does, actually, with a certain type of adolescent, the sort of slightly gloomy black-wearing kid, which I certainly was. My teacher just mentioned in passing that Shakespeare had a son who was called Hamlet and that he died about four years or so at the age of 11 before Shakespeare wrote the play. And even then, actually, you know, it really struck me even though I was, you know, let's face it,

a really long way off from being a writer and a very long way off from being a parent, you know, just this act of calling, you know, probably your most famous play and your most famous tragic hero, after your dead son, telling us something of speaking enormous volumes to me anyway. And I suppose later in, like you know,

I studied literature at university, so obviously I read a lot about Shakespeare at the time, lots of criticism and lots of biographies. And I was really struck, you know, as a student, by how little sort of mention Hamlet got and how he was really overlooked. I was just really astonished, actually, when I read these big sort of 500-page biographies of Shakespeare,

that Hamlet, if he was lucky, got maybe two mentions, you know, he mentioned that he was born, and mentioned that he died. And usually his death was, mention of his death and these biographies were kind of followed by quite long paragraphs with statistics of child mortality in Elizabethan age, which of course was very high,

almost as if the kind of implication was that it wasn't really that big of a deal because it was so common. I always found that assumption very, very mistaken, very, very misplaced, you know, because it seems to me that the play is underpinned by an enormous volume of grief.

You know, Hamlet, the play, the Hamlet in the play, is both alive and dead because, of course, the ghost is also Hamlet, so he's a ghost and he's a young man, and just this kind of, of dichotomy of presence and absence in that play is so, to me anyway, very, very strongly linked to this boy. The famous thing we know, we all know about Hamlet is to be or not to be. It's all this equivocation and this, shall I do this, shall I not? Should I revenge him? Should I

not? Should I kill him while he's praying? Should I not kill him while he's praying? And then in a sense, you know, when you look at it like that, he's actually frozen. He's frozen into inaction because he cannot bear that his father isn't there. He's missing him so badly. So in that way, it seems to me Shakespeare, I think, you know, is identifying with himself as a father who's lost someone, but also inhabiting his son's sort of position and thinking what would it have been like to you? You know, there's a kind of interchangeability between Shakespeare and Hamlet, I think. Given that you were so fascinated with Hamlet for such a long time and wanted to write the novel, why do you think it took you as long as it did?

I would often do a bit of research and I would start thinking about it and I might write a little bit, And then I would kind of swerve away and write other books. I wrote a memoir. I was a thing I wrote previously to this. And when I finished that, I kind of sat myself down and I gave myself a talking to. And I said, you know, either you're going to write this book about Hamnet, or you just had to forget about it. You know, you can't keep circling around it.

So you have to give it a try, a proper try. And I'm not really a superstitious person, but one of the things that kept stopping me was that I, so I have a son and two daughters, which is a similar gender breakdown anyway to the Shakespeare's family. but I couldn't write the book until my son was well past the age of 11. I knew that to write it, I'd have to put myself inside the skin of a woman who sits at the bedside of her son and is unable to save him and then she has to lay him out of a burial. And I didn't think I could do that until my son was safely past the age of 11. He is now, he's 17 and 6 foot tall.

But yeah, I couldn't comfortably sit down and do it until that had happened. Here's an extract from the audiobook of Hamnet. If you were to stand at the window in Hewlands and crane your neck sideways, it would be possible to see the edge of the forest. You might find it a restless verdant inconstant sight. The wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves. Each tree answers to the weather's ministrations

at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it. On a morning in early spring, 15 years or so before Hamnick runs to the house of the physician, a Latin tutor is standing in this place at the window, absently tugging on the hoop through his left ear.

He is watching the trees. Their collective presence, lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, brings to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled quickly into place to let the audience know they are now in a home, sylvan setting that the city or streets of the previous scene are gone, that they are now on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.

You've spoken in interviews before that many academics dismiss Agnes, aka Anne Hathaway, as this older and sophisticated peasant women who married Shakespeare, who was younger than she was. I mean, what is your take on all of this? Because Agnes Frum is quite an important part of the book. Yeah, well, it's funny. When I originally started to write the book, I sort of imagined that it would be mostly about fathers and sons,

as is the play, of course, but I was really unprepared for what I would find about Hamnut's mother, who is the woman we all know as Anne Hathaway, mostly for the vitriol and hostility towards her, that you find, you know, it goes right across the board from, you know, very, very serious scholars

to sort of popular culture. It's just a very, very pervasive idea we have of her. If you stop someone on the street and said to them, tell me some things about Shakespeare's wife. They were probably going to say one of two things, either that he had to marry her because she was pregnant. And also she was this older woman, she was uneducated, she was a peasant, he regresseded his marriage, he hated her, you know.

It's astonishing because when you actually look at the documentation, I mean, there's not even a record of her birth, you know, because she was born before parish records began. So we basically, we know they got married and we know that she had children and we know when she died, but there's not a great deal in between. There's one biographer that described her as the wife-shaped void. But what's happened is that people have rushed to fill this void with a great deal of misogyny actually and opprobrium and all this kind of assumptions about her. There are other people who have written novels about her who have depicted her as this kind of, you know, this strumpet, a prostitute, a nymphomaniac. I mean, I have no idea where this comes from.

There's absolutely no evidence for it at all. You know, looking at the actual facts we have to hand, there were two things that really stood out for me. One, when Shakespeare retired, he chose to come back and live in Stratford with his. family with his wife and daughters. And that to me doesn't speak of a man who regressed his marriage. And also he was, as well as being an actor and a pretty good playwright, he was actually a very successful businessman, which is something that really surprised me. It doesn't really fit with our image of the kind of head in the clouds artist. By the end of his career, at the end of his life, he was the equivalent of the multi-millionaire.

Wow. Yeah, it's astonishing. But he lived in incredibly modest lodgings in London. All his money he sent back to Stratford and he invested it in land and cottages and fields which he rented out to people. That again doesn't suggest somebody who hated his wife. So I don't believe it at all. But the other thing that really fascinated me is that I read her father's will. So her father, Richard Hathaway, died a year before she married William, and described her in his will as my daughter, Agnes. And I was so shocked. It was this revelatory kind of electrifying moment in the research for the book because I thought, you know, surely if anyone knows her real name, it would be her dad. And have we been calling her by the wrong name for 400 years. And it just seemed really emblematic of everything

we thought we know about her. And perhaps we've been wrong all along. I was so thrilled to be able to give this name back to her. So it was a great opportunity for a writer because giving her a different name to the one we think we know is sort of a way of asking readers to think again to say, you know, maybe let's open ourselves up to a possibility of a completely different interpretation of this woman. And interestingly, speaking of names, Shakespeare's never mentioned by name in the novel. So I was wondering what led you to that choice. Well, it was just the only choice, really. I mean, you know, I did try at the beginning.

But the problem is, you know, his name carries such heft, you know, and it carries so much with it. You know, we all of us have our own relationship with Shakespeare inside our heads. You know, he pervades our very language. Even just writing his name in a sentence like, you know, William Shakespeare walked up the path and knocked on the door, instantly you feel like an idiot. You feel like, you know, it just seems laughable.

And so, you know, if I couldn't write it, I could never in a million years expect people to read it. So, yeah, so I had to just kind of find a way. And it was at times that I felt like I was doing a bit of a kind of lexical and grammatical limbo dance trying to get these sentences and paragraphs to yield. I wanted to draw the focus away from who he is and his career in London because I think the biggest drama of his life happened off stage in Stratford, and that was the death of his son. Finally, you're on the Women's Prize shortlist and I was just wondering, you know,

what would winning this prize mean to you? Because you spent so long clearly working on this novel and it's just having it out there must feel like an accomplishment. Just being on the shortlist of the Women's Prize feels like an enormous win in itself, I have to say. I feel like it's a win-win situation. I feel like all six of us have won a prize just by being on that shortlist. I have no idea how the judges are going to judge them because they're all so different.

Do you know, well, it's completely different times and completely different spaces and different influences and inspirations. It's been such a pleasure actually reading all the other books on the shortlist and so I wish the judges could look. I don't know how they're going to decide. Finally, Hilary Mantell is no stranger to the Women's Prize shortlist. The Mirror and the Light brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. In her last book of the series, she traces the final year. of Thomas Cromwell. Will the 25th year of the Women's Prize be the one for her? That's in the hands of the judges. Meanwhile, we spoke to her about her book and what the Women's Prize means to her.

Despite the physical restrictions of lockdown, she told me she's still hard at work. I've just been getting on in a remarkably normal way. My book, and I'm lucky in this, came out just before the lockdown took hold. I've been getting on with the stage version. I mean, you've written for the stage now and TV for the adaptations of the first two books you're working on this book for the adaptation. Do you think having written it for TV and stage, that affected the writing for the final book? All the time when I was working on the mirror and the light, I had the stage adaptation in view, but not in a very simple way. I think that the conversations I had with cast members in the course of rehearsals for the first two plays were very influential in shaping the questions I asked myself about the inner life of my characters and how to make that explicit something I could show on the page. and sometimes I would think, well, just supposing you were doing this scene for this stage

and you had half a dozen exchanges and then you had to move on, how would you do it? The explanations have to be generated by the characters through them in their voice. So not so much the heavenly narrator who's pushing the drama along, but kind of self-generated. from the characters themselves. That's right, because no information is ever clean. It always comes from a viewpoint. Now here's an extract from the audiobook of The Mirror and the Light. London, May 1536.

Once the Queen's head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast. The morning circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses who have knelt for the passing of the soul stand and put on their hats, their faces stunned. But then he turns back to say a word of thanks to the executioner. The man has performed his office with style and though the king is paying him well, it is important to reward good service with encouragement as well as a purse. Having once been a

poor man, he knows this from experience. The small body lies on the scaffold where it has fallen, hands outstretched, it swims in crimson, the blood seeping between the planks. The Frenchman, they had sent for the Calais executioner, had picked up the head, swaddled it in linen, then handed it to one of the veiled women who had attended Anne in her last moments. The woman shuddered. She held it fast, though, and her head is heavier than you expect. Having been on a battlefield, he knows this too. I read in an interview once that you said that you never change a fact in your historical novels to heighten the drama.

So I'm curious to know if there was ever any historical incidents you came across while writing the trilogy where you thought, you know, oh God, how do I make this fit in? It doesn't quite cohere with my narrative of the character or what I imagine the character's inner life to be like. If you come across a piece of information, you will often find that it's a later interpolation. You ask who originally generated this information? Because, for example, if you look at the letters from various foreign ambassadors

to the Court of Henry VIII, you will find lots of gossip, lots of absolutely delicious little tick bits of information. You can take them for what they are, you don't take them as accurate. To a degree, you can let the reader in on the problem. The reader gets just as clever as you are in knowing who to believe and who not to believe.

Right, and conversely, was there ever a bit of information that you came across that might have not seemed that significant to scholars or academics but when you saw it you thought, well, this unlocks a whole character for me, this unlocks an entire account? Certainly. I think if I go back to Wolf Hall, the first book,

there's an episode that appears in every biography of Thomas Cornwell where at the fall of Cardinal Woolsey when his will comes crashing down around him he cries, he breaks down in semi-public circumstances everyone includes this and says oh this is so self-serving he's crying for himself maybe I'm the first person to have seriously considered the date

it was all souls Eve it's the evening when the dead come back and I thought of Cromwell's recent losses, his wife, his two little daughters. The Cardinals lost imminent. And suddenly, it puts a whole of his pen on what's happening. You've spent so long now with Cromwell as a character. You've spent years and years. And this is the final book in the trilogy.

Were you sad to say goodbye to him? I haven't said goodbye to him. We're talking about him now. I'll be talking about him probably for years. And as the play's shaping up, then he's giving voice to new words, new sentiments. So much of the book is also about Henry's wives. And you wrote a piece about Kate Middleton and Wallace Simpson

and, you know, the royal body as this kind of reproductive organ. And obviously, we've now got a very contemporary example of a kind of Wallace Simpson figure in Prince Harry's wife and how she's kind of taken him and plucked him out from the royal family, or at least that's what the tabloids would have you think about Megan Marco. I was wondering what you make of that development. I don't think one knows enough about the inner process is to comment with any authority. Just to say that with the thinking I have done about the royal body. I was not at all surprised at the hostile and, in my view, racist coverage of their romance, their marriage, their parenthood.

I think it must, from Megyn Markle's point of view, have been intolerable, and I wasn't surprised. that she decided to leave. I'm rather glad she took Harry with her and didn't feel forced to depart on her own. And for them, it's a new start. They can write a new story now. These bodies are human bodies, not just royal bodies. And I think what she has done is to assert that

she is not a body. to be endlessly discussed and dissected in the media. She has self-determination. This is not the first time you've been nominated for the Women's Prize. You've been nominated for the first two books and Beyond Black Two. And I was wondering, what would it mean to you to win the Women's Prize? Yes, it's my fourth effort and four consecutive books. I don't know if that's a record.

me. I would be absolutely delighted. I have always been 100% behind the prize ever since its inception. And I will say that of all the book prizes, there is a real feeling of mutual support. Whereas with other prizes, the shortlisted candidates tend to avoid each other. and Chitpo around each other. But at the woman's prize, you can actually sit down and have a really good chat with people. I can't remember now which shortlisting it was, but it was when Laurie Moore was up for the prize.

And when we all stood together to be photographed, she put her hand out and we all linked hands behind our back. And that felt just so wonderfully strengthening in that nervous moment. And that to me is the spirit of the Women's Prize. It's a showcase and it's a celebration. It's more than just a competition. I think that's a lovely way to describe the Women's Prize and I hope come September or whenever the Women's Prize ceremony is,

we can get to link arms with the shortlisted authors as well. Yes, I very much hope that will be the case. Many thanks to all the shortlisted authors for taking the time to speak to us. The winner of the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction will be announced on Wednesday, 9th September. I'm Zing Singh and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast,

brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Please click subscribe and don't forget to rate and review this podcast. It really helps spread the word about the female talent you've heard from today. You can head over to our website to find out more about the shortlisted authors, get exclusive audio and video content, and check us out at Women's Prize on Instagram and Twitter to join in the conversation.

Thanks very much for listening and see you next time.