Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S2 Ep8: Bookshelfie: Martha Lane Fox

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

In this episode Zing Tsjeng is joined by Martha Lane Fox, who takes us on a tour of her bookshelves and tells us her five favourite books by women. Martha is a business woman, philanthropist, public servant and was also a Women’s Prize judge in 2009 - when Marilynne Robinson's Home was crowned the winner and is the Chair of Judges for the Prize this year. She co-founded Lastminute.com during the dot.com boom and since stepping down from the company in 2003 has gone on to sit on the boards of Marks & Spencer and Channel 4 and patron a number of charities. Today, she sits on the boards of Twitter, Donmar Warehouse and Chanel, is a trustee of The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, a chancellor of The Open University and continues to advocate for human rights, women’s rights and social justice. Martha's book choices are: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing Villette by Charlotte Brontë Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson How to be both by Ali Smith  Memorial by Alice Oswald  Every fortnight, join Zing Tsjeng, editor at VICE, and inspirational guests, including Dolly Alderton, Stanley Tucci, Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis as they celebrate the best fiction written by women. They'll discuss the diverse back-catalogue of Women’s Prize-winning books spanning a generation, explore the life-changing books that sit on other women’s bookshelves and talk about what the future holds for women writing today. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and this series will also take you behind the scenes throughout 2020 as we explore the history of the Prize in its 25th year and gain unique access to the shortlisted authors and the 2020 Prize winner. Sit back and enjoy. This podcast is produced by Bird Lime Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Tees and Cs apply. 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. You've joined me for a special bookshelfy episode in which we ask an inspiring woman to share the story of her life through five brilliant books by women.

Welcome back to another episode of Bookshelfy, which we have recorded during the coronavirus lockdown. We are practicing safe social distancing and also at the whims of our internet connections. So we're recording this episode for you remotely. So if there's any technical issues, please bear with us. Today's guest is Martha Lane Fox. Martha is a businesswoman, a philanthropist, a public servant, and she was also the Women's Prize judge in 2009 when Marilynne Robinson's home was crown the winner, and she's also the chair of judges for the prize this year. She co-founded

last minute.com during the dot-com boom, and since stepping down from the company in 2003 has gone on to sit on a huge number of boards, Marks and Spencer's Channel 4, and she patrons a number of different charities too. She was the UK government's digital champion between 2010 and 2013, and it was a role that saw her team improve computer literacy across the UK. She also co-founded the karaoke company Lucky voice in 2005, a place where I personally have spent many, many hours singing Prince in, and the think tank dot everyone in 2015. In 2003, she joined the House of Lords as the youngest female crossbencher. Today, she sits on the boards of Twitter, the Donmar warehouse and Chanel. She is a trustee of the Queen's Commonwealth Trust, a chancellor of the Open

University, and she continues to advocate for human rights, women's rights and social justice. Martha, welcome. Thank you. How have you been doing in lockdown? Well, varied, I think like everyone, but I would sound like a terrible person if I said anything other than pretty good, just because I'm incredibly lucky I have a house with a garden so I can chuck my two, three and a half year olds outside, which I realise is a luxury compared to lots of people. And I have the kind of work where I am able to work at home quite a lot anyway, so I'm quite well set up. So I feel like I am in a relatively pre-prepared position, but it's still, it is a daily kind of process. of thinking how is the day going to be. So I hope I still have a lot of empathy for people all over the place in all different situations.

So I know this year you are the chair of judges for the women's prize. I am. What an incredible kind of circle that I've done through my life with this wonderful prize. I was a judge in 2009 when my friend Fee Glover, well, she wasn't my friend then, but she is my good friend now, which is one of the nicest things to come out of it, was the chair, and Marilynne Robinson's home won. and then I was on the board of the prize subsequent to that because I just couldn't help putting my awe in

and thinking about how I might be able to help the organisation of the prize and now to end up back as chair I feel very lucky. What is the difference between being a chair and being a judge? I think for me probably the key difference is that when you're a judge, I think I felt a kind of dual responsibility to represent the writers that I had been asked to read, but also my own specific kind of taste and subjectivity, because in the end, prizes are always relatively subjective.

I think as chair, of course I feel responsibility to the writers. That's always overwhelming to do them justice, to make sure you've read them carefully, to make sure you paid them all the right attention. But I also feel a big responsibility to make sure that all the voices of the judging panel are heard and that everybody feels as though they have books they love, in the long list and now obviously in the short list too. So I think that's the difference. It's that you're making sure that it's not such a quite a solipsistic activity. It's more clearly representing the collective action. So are you the person in the judging room making sure

that everyone gets the chance to speak and advocate for their chosen book? Oh, I wish I was in a judging room. I can't tell you how much I wish that was the case. We had our first meeting in an actual room. That's why I'm dwelling that point, which is lovely because we didn't all know each other before I'd met all of the judges individually before, but not, we didn't know each other well. And we had a great time. You know, it was, I know all judges always say this, but it would be hard to argue against this being a very strong year with talents such as all our shortlist, clearly, but then also, you know, Anne Enright, Anne Patchett, Margaret Atwood, we've had some big hitters, and we've also had some very impressive first novels. So that first longlist meeting was interesting,

difficult at moments, exhausting, fun, but in the end, I think all of us walked out feeling incredibly proud of the long list. The shortlist meeting, however, we had to do by Zoom. Right. It was four or five hours, I think in the end, four and a half hours. Just a Zoom meeting of that long is quite tough anyway. God, yeah. It was hard because quite rightly there were tensions around the books because quite rightly people had real passions around certain books. and we all had to cast aside books we loved, you know, every single one of us. And that led to some moments of slight tension. And I can say this because I know absolutely that we're all still friends and we can

all respect our choices. But it wasn't easy. And I think that added tension of not being able to stand up, walk outside the room, have a drink, have a laugh, give each other a cuddle, whatever it was, just didn't allow us to have that extra space. So what can you tell us about the short list this year? Well, what can't I tell you? I could honestly talk for about 20 hours about this subject, so just shut me up.

I think that, you know, I had to look across the shortlist. What really strikes me, and I was thinking about this the other day, is just these are big books, you know, and I don't mean they're long necessarily, I just mean they're tackling important themes. They're really, you know, whether they're geopolitical or whether they're political with a big P or small P. These are big topics, and I think they reflect the nature of where we're at in 2020 or as a published in 2019 more often perhaps. So I think that's the first thing. There are subjects here, you know, grief, identity, immigration, power, climate crisis.

It's all in there. And so anybody who has a vague interest in the world who is a paid up member of the human race will find something wonderful for them in these books. That's the first thing. I think the second thing is, though, that each book is such a point of excellence. As I said, this was an incredibly strong year, 25 years of the prize, maybe a few authors wanted to get their books into this year. And we were wrestling some really extraordinary books out of the shortlist, and that's a very strange position to be in. So each book I can honestly say is a real gem, and I would press it into the hands of anybody with a high recommendation.

How do you think women's fiction has changed over the years? because you've been involved with the women's price for quite a while now. Oh, I wish I was more of a literary expert. I can really only answer it from a reader's perspective and a kind of keen reader's perspective. I think the good parts are that it feels as though there is more of an emphasis on women's stories than I can remember in my lifetime.

When I look back now, even to kind of TV shows we were watching when I was younger or things we were reading, I don't think I was even aware of the complete absence so often of women's voices. And of course, the handsmaid's tale was on every single teenage woman's reading list and all of the things that we loved as young women are still true now. But there was still much less richness in women's storytelling and women's writing. And I think that that probably has been the biggest shift in my lifetime. And now it's just unimaginable that there wouldn't be the kind of importance in all kinds of women's stories being told as there would be in male voices.

I mean, we should never take that for granted because I think that still is quite a kind of Western liberal elite way of seeing the world. So I put it with those caveats. But I think specifically around the prize in the last 25 years and last 10 years is that, It feels as though women's writing has just got perhaps more confident, is telling more stories from different angles. There are, as I said, this shortlist is not inaccessible, not daunting, not too literary, but is tackling big, important topics. And if ever you need convincing that women's writing,

it just doesn't cover every subject under the sun, then you only need to look back at the women's prize over the last 10 years and look at the winners to see that everything is written about from every single point of view. So perhaps that's the change in just the credibility and the confidence and the validity of women's writing from all different angles. And I think you can see that as well from the books that you've selected for the bookshelfy episode because they cover huge breadth of topics and time and different authors. Yes, but of course they were received at their time in very different ways, which is partly when I was reminding myself of them, kind of interesting about. one is that, you know, I think any of those, well, we'll talk about the books, but any of them,

if published now, would have had obviously a very different reception to when they were published, but even the ones published relatively recently, I think, become different because of different themes popping out or just the context having changed around what it was kind of accepted in quotation marks for women to write about. So the first book that you selected was the Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, which I think is a great example of exactly what you've just been talking about. Absolutely right. I mean, I was heavily influenced into reading this book by my mum, who was an enormous Doris Lessing fan and has really, actually both my parents, my dad is a rare beast and he's quite a hardcore

academic historian, but he also loves reading novels and I think that's unfortunately more rare among men than it is among women. So both my mom and my dad loved and encouraged me to read, but my mum particularly now, we're always talking about books and she, I think, pressed the golden notebook into my hands. And it's particularly, I remember thinking about the experience of being at that time, what it was called Rhodesia, but, you know, South Africa in African subcontinent, and the kind of oppression of that place and that being so struck by the dual nature of the oppression in geography and then the oppression in the lead character's life. So it's an incredible achievement because she makes both very local,

points about this individual character, but then huge geopolitical, important points about what it was like in that country at that time. And how old were you when you read the book? I can't remember exactly and I don't want to make myself sound like some kind of ridiculously a precocious young person, because I really wasn't, I think it was probably about 17 or 18. Yeah, I think just pre-university is when I remember reading it. And what struck you about the book when you read it at that age? As I say, I think I did not know enough about what had happened in South Africa and the politics around that. And that was at a time when I remember being given the afternoon of school when Nelson Mandela was freed. So it was still such a live political issue in the late 80s.

And so I think that probably was particularly resonant with me. But I also think the story itself has got this. very strong politics in it, but also this kind of internal life of the central character, which is really overwhelming and incredibly written in scraps and segments and like recollections and memories. So it was this very, very, very interesting and intoxicating combination of the big politics of the piece, but then also the kind of quite postmodern and strange writing of the story. And I remember thinking that this was just, wow, what is this? This is an incredible. I hadn't seen this kind of writing before. And what kind of effect do you think it had on

you reading it at that age? Because, I mean, precocious maybe, but 1718, that's an amazing age to read a book by Lessinger. I think it made me want to read more Doris Lessing. I think that's the main thing it made me to want to do, which I did, and maybe more to understand more about her and also about what had happened at that time in that country. And as I say, when we got given the after, maybe I read it actually when I think so, I'm trying to piece the chronology together. I think maybe I did read it after Mandela had been freed. And as I say, I was at school in central London and we were given the afternoon of school and we all went to Trafalgar Square. And I remember sitting on one of the lines in Trafalgar Square as they blasted out free Nelson

Mandela from huge speakers. And it felt certainly in my lifetime like the most important moment of freedom. And I think probably this, I must have read this. I think maybe that was my mum pressed it into my hands afterwards, took me minute to remember the exact chronology. So, yeah, it definitely made me want to read Modora's lesson. It definitely made me think, oh my God, women can write anything. And it's just, it did blow my mind that both the style and the substance. That's also an incredible moment to have lived through as well, the Nelson Mandela being freed. Yes, I feel very lucky to have done that, quite old now, but it is a kind of moment of history. And, you know, extremely lucky that my school had the four thought to let us go and run down and be in Trafalgar Square.

I mean, that was really quite remarkable now, I think back to it. I mean, I always think about what kind of pivotal moments each generation lives through because, you know, you had these kind of huge earthquake moments like Nelson Mandela being free the fall of the Berlin War, but then as you get closer to our current decade, you get terrible moments of, you know, time like 9-11, for instance, 70, well, you have the pandemic now, it just makes me wonder, you know, what kind of literature people are going to pick up, especially young people, that they're going to feel are going to reflect their times now. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, as you get to the great age, I'm 47,

and you think about those moments. And I feel as though, you know, things that kind of framed the themes and topics that I guess I sought out or saw in literature were based around, around those moments that I felt I personally experienced, as you say, and I definitely Nelson and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 80s was one. Also, you know, I lived in London, well, the IRA bombings were happening. I remember being involved in two bombs, you know, not hurt at all, but running down Oxford Street when the bomb exploded in John Lewis, and then being again at school in central London,

we were always being evacuated because they thought they'd seen a suspicious package. That seems such a distant thing now, but it's really hard to underestimate how living in London in the late 70s, early 80s, late 80s, that was always around you as that anxiety about packages. And obviously then financial crash 9-11. I was running my company last minute.com 9-11 and I remember somebody in our customer service team calling me on the phone saying, come, come quickly, something extraordinary is happening on the television and I went down to where the customer service team were and we saw the second plane fly into the tower live.

and from every view that is such an extremely surreal thing to witness, kind of the first, many people have talked about it out there, television being such a profound thing at that time, not pre, kind of pre-social media and so on. So that felt like a big deal, as did the financial crash because of the ramifications across everybody's lives, even if they felt a bit more hidden than perhaps what we're seeing now. So yes, that's a funny thing about becoming nearly 50s,

and they can kind of dot your lives with these moments. I remember reading somewhere that in 91 you ended up writing a paper about the internet to explain what the internet was, which seems now looking back on it, absolutely mad. I can't imagine people not knowing what the internet was at the time and you having to mount an argument for the existence of a thing that is now omnipresent. Oh, this was actually when we were doing our business plan for last minute.com. So that was in 1997. And it was, when I was at university, I was certainly not writing about the internet. I was writing about ancient history. things far removed from tech, although often very connected to ideas and innovation. No, that was in last minute.com's early days. In 1997, it seems pretty strange, and that's nearly 30 years ago. It seems weird that no one was interested in Last Minute.com because nobody believed the internet was going to exist.

I mean, they really didn't. They thought we were nuts for suggesting that the internet was not going to just sort of slowly blow up. So I think that it's easy to forget how quickly all those things. have shifted. I know. I mean, 97 doesn't even seem like that long ago. When you think about what was happening, then, you know, Spice Girls, Dolly the Sheep, New Labour, you just assumed the internet was there. Yes, exactly, but it really wasn't. And people certainly weren't buying things on them. I didn't think it was safe to use their credit cards online. So, yeah, it moved very fast. But

those early days, it was just to do a kind of an evangelical mission to convince people that this technology was powerful, empowering, and was going to be something that was going to be part of everybody's daily lives. So the second book you picked is Villette by Charlotte Bronte. It's her last book, right? Yes, I think so. But it is really a remarkable novel. And I think probably for me, has more potency than Janeair, which is obviously her most famous novel. It's sort of loosely based on, I think, some of the events that happened in her own life as well, when she was sent to France to be a tutor to some young people. But it's about a central character called Lucy, who gets sent to France at a young age. And she's sort of a bit of a lacklustre character. But she has this extraordinary journey. I'm not going to go through the twists and turns of the story. but loves ups, loves downs and she gets drawn to a particular man

who then loves, leaves her comes back, it's a complex story, and it's got sort of lots of psychological pieces in it, sort of semi, what the expression is, but sort of fantastical bits in it as well, dreams and so on, and you don't quite know at the end whether it's going to end up happy or end up sad, but it's just an extraordinary piece of writing.

And, you know, if you can think of that sense of sort of doom in Janeair, She builds on that incredibly as well and it's really got such power to the imagery and to this young girl story which I think at the time I read it was also probably one of the things that attracted me to it. When did you read it for the first time?

I think I read it when I was pretty young actually. I think that it was one of those things that having read Jane now, I think my dad probably said, try this because it's really an extraordinary novel. and I remember, you know, I did ancient history, I did history more than, didn't do English for my A-level, I did history, Latin, and Greek for my A-Level, and I wished in a way that I've done English, but I kept kind of reading novels, and I think I probably read this feeling a bit grumpy that I was meant to be reading Thucydides when I should have been reading Bronte.

So I think probably, again, but maybe around the same time as the Golden Notebook, but I remember thinking, what am I doing? Why didn't I pick English? when I'd read Rillette as well, I wanted to be able to understand it more from different angles because it, again, again, thinking about this, it's also got this strong element of psychology.

I mean, every book has, but in the Golden Notebook and in Millette, there are these strong, like a psychodramatic kind of battles. It's got quite a kind of got gothic theme in it, and her psyche is really interestingly depicted. You know, she often feels very, very lonely. She feels displaced by where she is. She's kind of got all these counterlaving forces

working in her life. She starts off with this very passive person. She doesn't end up as that person. So I think all of those kind of psychological drama as one as the kind of just action drama, I found really incredible achievement. Sail the world a different way with Fred Olson Cruise Lines. Our award-winning itineries are unusual and imaginative, bursting with local culture, history and wildlife, and aboard our smaller ships, the atmosphere is always warm and friendly. It would be easy to follow the crowds, but we never will, because this is our way, the Olson Way,

booked by the 31st of January for free drinks or spend on selected sailings. Visit freddolsoncruises.com for more information. Tees and Cs apply. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish Cream. Bayleys 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 hand of more people. Baileys is a perfect adult treat, whether in coffee, over ice cream, or paired with your favorite book.

Official announcement, Sunshine is Coming Our Way. Celebrate the changing seasons and the sweet taste of spring with a Bailees on ice alongside your favorite shortlisted book. Or if you'd prefer a vegan treat, try Baileys Almand for the delicate taste of fall. almond with a blend of real vanilla. And your third book that you picked is actually one of my favorite books. Oranges are not the only fruit by Jeanette Winterson. Yes, I mean, what an incredible novel. And I only saw the film actually quite recently,

but it was made into a film by a woman called Beban Kidron, who is now one of my fellow crossbenches in the House of Lords. And I don't think she even knows this, but when I first met her, I was a bit overwhelmed because I've quite recently seen the film, and it was one of my favorite books. So I couldn't really tell her that I thought what she'd done with the book was so incredible. Because so often you see something and you think, oh God, no, you've ruined it.

But actually, you did a spectacular job, maybe a female director as well. Perhaps that helps. One's not the only fruit is about a woman coming of age, having a lesbian relationship, having a kind of tussle with the church and Jeanette's own background. As I understand it, very strong kind of Pentecostal family, very, very, very doer, very strict. And obviously, her life didn't turn out like that at all. So there were many more parallels than perhaps I realized when I first read it when I was relatively young, I think, in my early 20s. But it's, she writes, she's just got such incredible, she's got spiky, clever writing.

She's got real wit to her, but also a darkness. And she just sees things perhaps because of her own experience, not having been entirely easy. And I, you know, this novel, if people have heard of it, is partly because it's kind of famous for being a kind of lesbian, a novel but I didn't it's not just that it's far beyond that it really is um about lots of things and religion is a lot at the heart of it so there's many many themes in it which i remember um kind of being really interested by when i read it and you mentioned you're in your 20s when you read this i think so yes i think i was at university um i think that a friend recommended it to me uh but i can't remember the exact place of which year at university, but I think I remember walking around Oxford with it in

my in my backpack, a well-torn-up copy of it in my backpack. A classic image of Oxford. Well, clearly, I know, conforming completely to type there. I mean, you studied, you mentioned you studied classics and ancient history at Oxford. Yes. What was that like? Because you didn't, we ended up doing anything with a degree shortly after you left, or did you just go straight into tech and entrepreneurship? I mean, yeah, I think the degrees are partly of something. give you directly transferable skills, but they're much more about trying to teach you how to think. I didn't really love my time at Oxford, I know that sounds a bit spoiled, but I found a lot of it misogynistic, I found it a lot of it hierarchical, stuffy, old-fashioned. I have one or two cheaters,

which were completely wonderful, and I loved, but a lot of it I did not. I, as I say, I enjoyed history because I loved piecing together the past, and I loved seeing the connections between modern India and ancient Athens or, you know, medieval England and the Enlightenment or whatever it was, but I think I squandered a lot of it, and certainly I don't quite know what my degree would have led me straight into, so yes, it led me straight into somewhat strange career in technology and entrepreneurship, so, but I do think that reading history, as reading books, it does teach you the curiosity about the world and teach you about other people and different perspectives and trying to think about characters and casts across time. And that's what I always

most enjoyed was making those connections and those bits of what might seemingly wildly different bits of time and space actually you can always find the connections. I mean, you've had a really varied career yourself. But what do you think are the connections between all the different things that you've done in your life? I wish I could have had more of a plan so that I could say, well, it was this. But a lot of what I've done has been serendipity and then sort of sometimes necessity at this very serious car accident in the early 2000s. And so my work at life had to be a bit somewhat reorganised.

And so didn't quite, there was somewhat different to how expected. But I really love now the different things I'm involved in. I think if I hope, I hope what links things. are probably two or three different things, but I did fall into the internet and understanding technology to a little degree early on in my life. So there is always an underpinning

of kind of what the technology we have in the modern world is doing to our modern world. That's why I started my business with my business partner, but also now, I then went on to work a lot around government and use of technology and also now being in the Lords as well trying to bring a technology perspective to issues of public policy and legislation.

So there's always some kind of technology pull because I feel as though it's important to ask those questions and to make sure that we are thinking like 2020, no, 1820 when we try to answer those public policy questions. So that's definitely technology. But also, you know, I really always all my life, I wanted to do much, would go much more into public service than I did into the commercial world. I first tried to get into the home office because I wanted to go into the prison service because I wanted to change and reform the prison service when I was young. Lots of reasons why I won't go into why that was, but I got rejected because I didn't get a very good degree and then I went to technology. So I've always, I hope, had a strong sense

of public purpose. I helped set up a charity. I've always tried to, you know, contribute as much as I can and try and make things better. So, you know, maybe flattering myself, but I hope if there's anything in my career that links the things I've done, it's always a sense around innovation and tech, but also always trying to think about how to improve things a little bit, only one voice I know and always with other people and teams, but those are the things that motivate me and inspire me. I mean, I feel like we could talk about the tech issue for ages, because, I mean, it's really kind of the illuminating issue of our age. You know, everything just feeds back to technology and who can access it and what it can do, what it's doing for Hugh, how much it costs,

who has access. I mean, I don't think that in 1997 people even thought that the internet would be the one thing that roos over our lives so much. It's just such a strange time, isn't it? It's this kind of, there's been a huge backlash against tech over the last two or three years, people feeling understandably anxious about it. My small charity. Everyone did some research a couple of years ago.

50% of people said they loved what the internet did for them every day and only 12% said they thought that it helped society. We've just redone that same research for the current moment. And it's not much shifted. People feel a little bit more as though they understand about data and where it's going. But only 19% of people feel as though the technology is built for them with their own best interests. And that's sad because these are technologies are not going away. They're getting more powerful, not less powerful.

People don't trust them really, but they sort of feel like they have to use them. no, none more so than at this moment in time, then, you know, it's complicated because these, I think, are things that are just going to get more embedded in our lives, not less, and it's important that we trust them. So the fourth book that you picked is How to Be Both by Ali Smith, which won the Women's Prize in 2015. It did, and I've re-read it recently, and I have to say, I find it even more breathtaking, I think, than the last time I read it, which was probably a couple years ago. It's a story that is published so that you, it's two halves of the same story, and one set in the modern day and one set in Renaissance Florence. And you get books published with either story first. So you might get your book published in, sorry, copy of the book published contemporary version first.

You might get the Renaissance version first. And it doesn't matter which way around you lead them. You can be back to front, upside down, whatever. So that's just kind of an interesting device in itself. And it's as much a book about brilliance of writing and the way to write, in my opinion, as it is about the story. But it's such an amazing achievement because this is a story that, as I say, is set in these two time zones but finds the links between them,

which obviously I have found appealing because of, as we've discussed, my interest in finding those connections through history. It's about grief, about identity, about gender, about power, all those things. It's also about art and our relationship to art, but it's also an incredible exposition of what writing can do because it's got these amazingly kind of imaginative and beautiful passages. It's like poetry at moments, short sentences, long sentences, broken down sentences, fragments, memories, like songs, bits of technology in those bits as well,

things about the internet, it's really extraordinary. But it's not literary. it's also a very good read and a fun read and it's moving. And I really, really, really, we love this book and it hasn't lost any of its power over time. In fact, I think some of the themes have got more resonant because there's a lot about internet technologies. And if you think it was written, I can't remember the publishing date, but probably three or four years, maybe five years ago. It's got even more profound now. So that was quite an achievement that Alice Smith pulled off, that she could find those themes for all time, especially in tech, which moves so quick.

No, and especially, you know, you'll read a book sometimes and they'll mention technology like email or messaging and it will just strike you as being completely false or, you know, like it feels a bit shoved in to make the book appear more contemporary. Yes, I agree, but that's not how this is in the book at all. And one of the kind of story plots in it is that the girl in the contemporary part of the book has recently lost her mother, is trying to understand her mother a bit more. and she thinks that she might have been being spied on by the state because she was quite an activist. She discovers a whole lot of things about her mother. But there's a lot of stuff in there. No time is more kind of, as we've just discussed, these are really current themes around people's anxieties about what tech is doing to them and how governments are using it. So that's quite extraordinary when you think about it.

When did you become interested in using tech for public good and looking more to explore? or how technology could be harnessed for public service? Well, I think it's actually more surprising that I started something commercial than the other way around. I think after the accident, I did a bunch of different things trying to rebuild my brain back up again as well as my body.

And then I got this opportunity to work for Gordon Brown as digital champion for the UK. And suddenly I felt, oh my goodness here, I found all these boxes that are given me the real kind of motivation and energy. He'd asked me to look at that point, 50 million adults in the UK, but more actually 20 million adults in the UK

that weren't using the internet, often skewed by socioeconomic background. I mean, obviously some infrastructure issues in rural areas as well, but more often because people didn't have the money or the skills. And that just suddenly I realized that I'd been operating in this sort of elite clearly of tech, but more than that, this kind of excitement about startups and all of the things that we got over-excited by

at last minute.com and the current and the subsequent tech landscape, that just wasn't true of vast ways of the UK and particularly, you know, the digitising, if you like, of people's, the services that people were using all the time, you know, we were having, on the one hand, amazing, amazing ability to order things on the internet suddenly or, you know, look for friends on Facebook, but at the same time, you couldn't actually just get anything done in government. So I think it was really in that late 2009, 2010, and I just thought, wow, this, you know, the world I have operated in, and then the world I've sort of been thinking about from a complete different angle, have got to come together, you know, we've got to match up the kind

of charitable sector, the social sector, the public service sector, with some of the technologies that I'd been lucky enough to be exposed to. What happened with the accident and how do you think it affected the way you look at? at your career since then? That's a big question, a hard one to answer about yourself, I think, a bit. I had a very serious car crash in 2004. I spent nearly two years in hospital.

I broke 28 bones. I had a stroke. Edgar had to be relent. So, walking, everything. And it lives in me every single day as a result of what happened to me. I had made money from my company. I could afford incredible care at home, got me out of hospital way earlier than other people

would have been able to get out of hospital. I had access to kind of fast track physios, you know, emergency operations and practically a day doesn't go by. I don't think about people who didn't have that resources because there's no question I would have died and that's quite a kind of sobering thought. So that changes something, of course, because you are, I hope I'd always been grateful that you're grateful X when you realize that there's sliding doors moments. And then there's just the kind of just physical nature of now my life.

So, you know, I walk with a stick outside. I have a lot of kind of long-term chronic challenges. And so you just have to be a bit more flexible on how I organise my working life. That means I don't have just that one job that I do, nine to five. I have this kind of difference of many jobs probably work as hard if not harder, but just in a kind of slightly more flexible, autocratic way, I guess. So it did change. I think it, I hope it didn't really reorganise my values.

You know, I think it's easy to write a story of someone's life and say, oh, well, after the accident, that was when she suddenly became this public servant. I don't, I don't feel that to be true. I think what it just did was that made me have the confidence to think, some of the things that perhaps I had just fallen into before. Now I really wanted to focus on the stuff that really mattered to me. Yeah, I think I've met lots of people in the tech industry. who, you know, in the Russian excitement of being in a startup and making things and learning fast

and making mistakes, they kind of forget the fact that the rest of the world exists and some of the world might not ever get the chance to use whatever technology they're developing because of really entrenched social issues. Yeah, exactly right. And the irony being that those entrenched social issues can often be helped or improved by better use of technology. Now, I don't mean by that that everything should be on the internet, not at all, but I do think that good use of the internet can help people's experience. And it makes me laugh, as you say, sometimes you have this conversation with me, like, why do you keep trying to force everyone online, says the tech entrepreneur who's made hundreds

of millions, who's talking to me on like six different iPhones at the same time? And you just think, well, imagine if you hadn't had those access to technology. I mean, imagine now if you were in lockdown, you don't have an internet connection, or you can't afford one, or you can afford one, but you don't know how to use it. You don't have the same opportunities for your children because of that. You have the same opportunities to connect to friends and family, to get into take, whatever it is. It's a more limited world and it's a more frustrating world. And so that alone now should be the moment that we see that we have to make sure that we make the UK as digitally resistant, resilient as we can.

We need amazing infrastructure, incredible skills. We need to make sure people whose jobs are going to change are equipped to deal with that change. I mean, crucially need to make sure that our public sector, hospitals, care homes, local government is in the 21st, 22nd century, not still in the 19th century, which sometimes they are. And that does not allow us to provide the best service to citizens. No, I think that's a really strong recommendation for technology. I feel like I completely agree that some people now are just very paranoid and suspicious. I mean, you just need to look at the, you know, very thin end of the wedge where people are. are just spouting 5G conspiracy theories to see that a lot of people are frightened of what

they might not understand about technology and they're frightened of the kind of potential it has. Yes, I agree. I think that it really, it's not, it's not optional this stuff now. I think that, you know, this kind of, it's like the climate crisis. We don't need to keep talking about whether or not we're about to face another catacly kind of existential crisis. We're in it. and we have to deal with it just as we are in this process of digitisation, and either we will get a grip of it and help our country move forward, or we won't, and we will suffer the cover of it.

But I think it's that binary to my mind. I feel like we could talk about this issue forever, but we still need to go through your fifth and final book, which is Memorial by Alice Oswald. And this is actually, I think, one of the first poetry books that's been recommended by someone on bookshelfy. Oh, well, I'm very glad indeed that that's the case. I love poetry.

actually in this lockdown every Wednesday night, me and five brilliant women discuss a poem for 45 minutes. Some of the great joys of my week, because even with all the work we're all trying to do and all the childcare and all the stuff, I can normally find 10 minutes to read a poem before we have our conversation about it. And it just lifts your mind in a way that feels so fantastic.

So I really urge anybody listening to this. You might think, oh, I can't read an 800-page book. Find a poem. Just read a poem. any poem because I guarantee you'll feel better at the end of it, or not better necessarily, but you'll feel equipped to deal with the next chunk of day. And I love poetry. And I think Alice Oswald is one of the most remarkable contemporary writers, let alone poets that we have in the UK. I'd love to meet her. She has written a bunch of different things. She's written a very

well-known poem called Dart about the river that she lives on in Devon. But this is a something different which I guess appeals to my classical nature, which is again an ode, I guess, a memorial to the soldiers that died in the war, the Trojan War. And it's really incredible because it's taking the fragments of what we know from Homer and telling them from a different angle and giving each soldier a moment in the, I guess in the sunlight to be remembered. And it's so moving when you see the kind of scale of death and destruction through these individual stories or what we don't or do know about them. And it's not only a beautiful poem like all poetry, she reads it out loud and just hear the beat of the verse through it. But it's also

very moving about that war and the clever trick she plays in retelling it. from this angle. I'm guessing you must have had to read loads of poetry during your degree. No, because I studied ancient and modern history, so I didn't read that much poetry. I wish I had read more poetry. I'd probably been a better historian if I had read more poetry. But I think that, and I actually think,

I'm just thinking out that I think that there's not enough inclusion of poetry in the study of history, actually. there are some poems that are taken as historical texts like some Homer, I guess, but it's still this separation between fiction and nonfiction, which I guess arguably what history is about in some ways too, is sometimes too great. And I often really learn so much more about history from reading poetry than from reading history books. I feel like sometimes the poets captured the mood of the time better than the historian. Absolutely right. No, of course. Of course, of course.

And that's why I think reading poetry now, I mean, even poetry that's written for another time, is often very illuminating and reassuring and comforting. Is there any poetry that you're reading now in particular? Well, this week, we all choose different poets each week. And I've been reading Adrienne Rich. I don't know if you know her. Amazing poet. Amazing poet. I did not know well, I have to say again, not as a poetry expert.

But I wish I had them all. I feel somewhat embarrassed that there's a, someone who hopes that they know a little bit about women's issues and a strong feminist reader, but I hadn't read more of her poetry, but I've absolutely adored finding out about her, and I think some of the poems are completely fantastic. So that's who I've been discovering this week.

So with your poetry club that you have every week with your friends, all of you just read a single poem together and you just discuss it. Yes, we do. And then someone else chooses a different poem the next week. That's a lovely idea, because it's so much more accessible than reading a whole book. Absolutely. And it doesn't, you know, exactly, it doesn't really matter if you've read the poem or not, if you just can't get to it. We read it out loud when we're talking to each other and, you know, there's no point reading poems if you're not reading them out loud. And it's actually inspired me to spend time now each week with three different goddaughters, reading poems with them, because homeschooling is obviously a freaking nightmare and everybody's at different levels of frustration or delight. And one of the things I thought I could do is spend just half an hour with these things. three different people at different times in the week, women at different times in the week,

that then choose a poem and us talk about it. So that's also been absolutely lovely, because seeing it from a much younger person's perspective is really wonderful too. That's an amazing idea. I actually think some people are going to go off after listening to Zepisode and do that themselves. I very much hope so. So many wonderful poetry anthologies. My friend William Seekart produced this wonderful pharmacy of poetry. That's a lovely way to start. If we look that up, Pharmacy. My first poetry book was Ted Hughes and Shemis and Shiamis for the Rattlebag. That's a wonderful book of poetry. So pick anything up. You can't go wrong. So if you had to choose one book from the list you've just talked about as your favourite,

which one would it be? Oh my God, I can't do that. I actually can't. I'm really torn between Memorial and How to Be Both, because they're both so phenomenal. And I feel as though how to be both on picking it up again in this current time, I had not imagined that I would see so many themes that felt relevant. So I think I might have to choose how to be both. But I have to say reading poetry, Alice Oswell's Memorial, so I'm going to do a Booker Prize and pick two, which is not what we will be doing at all.

We will have one winner with our prize, I promise. But I think how to be both. It's such an astonishing, not only did it teach me so much about writing and language, but also about the human experience. It really is a wonderful novel. Well, thank you very much for recommending that because I think a lot of people will be going off and reading that now. We've actually discussed it on reading women.

If anybody would want to find out more about the book, you can pick up that episode and have a listen before you dive in. Yes, do. Again, I hope I haven't made it sound too literary. It really isn't. It is a literary achievement, but part of its genius is this is very light of touch and can be very funny.

So that's what I find it. So such a wonderful, wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Martha, for coming on the podcast. My total pleasure. This is one of the nicer technology experiences. I don't feel I've got like 5,000 people who are shouting at me on Zoom. I feel as though it's always a delight to talk about books. And yet again, I think, why did I not spend more of my life in the book world?

Why have I spent so much time in tech? So thank you very much for having me. I'm Zing Singh. You've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. You definitely want to head to our website to find out more about the Reading Women Challenge, get exclusive video and audio content and check out the hashtag Reading Women on Instagram and Twitter to join in the conversation around the 24 brilliant past winners of the Women's Prize in Fiction.

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