Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep22: Bookshelfie: Kate Mosse

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Author and Women’s Prize founder director Kate Mosse reveals the books that have shaped her and also makes an exciting announcement: the intention to launch a new annual book prize, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Kate is the author of ten novels and short story collections, her books have sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and her fiction has been translated into 38 languages. She has also written four works of non-fiction including the critically acclaimed memoir An Extra Pair of Hands and four plays. A ceaseless champion of women’s creativity, Kate is of course also the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the recently announced Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Kate’s latest book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries, looks at the achievements of 1,000 unsung women in history, and she is kicking off her one-woman theatre tour on February 28th.  Kate’s book choices are:  ** The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison ** Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ** Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich ** Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie ** This is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan  Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season five of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of Season Five? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

I didn't find my voice and I became an overnight success with my fifth book, a novel called Labyrinth when I was 45. And nobody could have been more surprised than me. But it was a wonderful thing. You went into a bookshop or more than that, you went into Tesco's. And there was your book on the shelf in the number one slot. And I can remember standing there with my children thinking, well, who would have thought it? With thanks to Bayleys, 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 Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 5 of the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast.

The podcasts that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. We have a phenomenal lineup of guests and I guarantee you'll be taken away plenty of reading recommendations. Today I am so excited to welcome best-selling novelist and non-fiction writer Kate Moss to the podcast. Kate is the author of 10 novels and short story collections. Her books have sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and her fiction has been translated into 38 languages. She's also written four works of non-fiction, including the critically acclaimed memoir, an extra pair of hands and four plays. She's a ceaseless champion of women's creativity. Kate is, of course, also the founder-director of the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Kate's latest book, Warrior Queen's and Quiet Revolutionaries, looks at the achievements of 1,000 unsung women in history. And she's just announced a one-woman theatre tour in 2023. I literally don't know how she's found the time to join us today, but she has, and we are so glad. Welcome, Kate. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I'm at the stages of finishing a novel at the moment. So I'm spending most of my time with imaginary friends.

Well, before you came on the recording, we were just having a little chat. And he said you've been up all night with lesbian pirates. Absolutely. I mean, you can't see fear of them. Well, the new novel is, it's called The Ghost Ship. It comes out in July. And it's partly, it's a love story between two women, but it's partly inspired by the real life story of two notorious female pirates,

Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid. and they were you know they terrorized the Caribbean at the end of the 17th century and they were just extraordinary women and of course it makes sense doesn't it that many women would disguise themselves as men and run away to sea because they would have some liberty they wouldn't have the constrained lives of women at home so yeah lesbian pirates I spend my night with lesbian pirates I spend my day well I won't say who I spend my day well you are on a deadline and you know I for one when I'm writing an article here and there, despite it being so many years since university and I was a, I was a real crammer. It was always at the last minute. I still haven't learned. Do you still find when you're writing that you find yourself in the same situation every single time? It's just, I'm so disappointed with myself, Vic, to be honest. Now, I'm 61 and it's still an essay crisis. I've, you know, published 10 novels. I've published four works of nonfiction, in various plays.

This is my career. But yet, I still leave the writing of the book until it's almost too late to write it to the deadline. And I've tried to work out why that is, and I think it's that I need the adrenaline and the fear of failing in order to access the thing that makes the book my book. There can't be any other reason for it,

because it's like I'm sabotaging myself. Yeah, I think there's every time, like, I don't enjoy this feeling. And yet I put myself through it. It's self-sabotage every single time. But there must be a reason. There must be. And there's such research that goes into your writing as well.

And you've written all these brilliant works of non-fiction. Excitingly, I am so excited about the fact that this has come to fruition. The Women's Prize has just announced that they intend to launch a Women's Prize for non-fiction. Can you tell us why that is, why you wanted to do this a little bit about that? Well, over lockdown, like many writers, I had a chance to do projects that I hadn't really had time to do before because I'm a novelist and a playwright, and that was really my focus.

But I have written some non-fiction. And so during lockdown, I wrote a book, a piece of feminist history, really, or Borea Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries. And I spent a lot of time, therefore, looking into what happened to nonfiction written by women. And it was really salutary because it was in a way quite straightforward. There was this idea that women weren't quite experts, that women's nonfiction was not as significant, if you like,

as nonfiction published by men. And there was a notorious moment last summer, in the summer of 2022, when the Times, I think it was, published a list when there were two people going to be the unelected Prime Minister of the UK at that stage, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. And the Times published a list of the books that either of those two people, one a man and one a woman, don't forget, should read.

Not a single non-fiction book by a woman on it, all men. And so the women's prize has, you know, for 28 years, we have amplified and honored and celebrated women's voices and fiction, and we set it up because we could see that women's voices and fiction were not being rewarded by prizes. And prizes matter because, they keep books on the shelf and they bring readers to work an exceptional quality. So for a long time, I've really nursed the desire to do the same for non-fiction.

And there's so much brilliant non-fiction being published at the moment by women across the board. And we need to be listening to women's voices because let's be honest. The world is in a hell of a state. And actually, we need more women's voices out there because maybe we could do it a bit better. Talking of putting women's voices out there, I do have to tell you when I judged the Women's Prize for Fiction back in 2020, and thank you so much for having me, by the way, it was an amazing experience. You sent so many boxes of books. The initial submissions all got sent to my flat, and there was just no space in my tiny little Hackney East London flat. So these books have remained in boxes for two and a half years, and it was only last night. night when I moved house. And I said the whole way through, I need a new house to just house these books. Finally moved. And I've got some bookshelves and my books finally have a home.

And they look lovely. When you send us a picture. I will. I will. I was just, I was just showing everyone in the studio. I was very proud. It was the first thing. My clothes are all still in boxes. Everything's still in boxes, but the books came out first. Yeah. The books come first. I mean, that's the thing when you're asked those gaff questions when you're doing an interview about, you know, if the house was on fire, what would you take with it? And of course, it would always be, I'd always put my hand out and take my very old original copy of Wuthering Heights

that my mum bought me. You know, it would always be a book that I saved first, as long as the people were saved. Well, we're going to talk about the books that you would save, the books that mean the most to you, the books that have shaped you today. And your first book, Shelfy Book, is The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison.

This is Nobel Prize winner Tony Morrison's debut novel and follows Perkola Breedlove, a child who every night prays for blonde hair and blue eyes so that she'll be as beautiful and beloved and privileged as her white school fellows. This is a powerful interrogation of what it means to conform to an idea of beauty and asks vital questions about race, class and gender. Tell us about this book. Why did it make it onto your list? I have an original edition of this, an old paperback edition,

which has a very raggedy child's doll, a really cheap doll, cloth doll on the front. And it always reminds me of when I first read this book, it was suggested to me by my American tutor at university. And she said, yeah, but everybody knows Tony Morrison, but do you know her first novel? and I can remember sitting finishing it, sitting at the bottom of the stairs in my house

because I just couldn't, there was nowhere that felt appropriate even to sit to read a book that was this significant, both, you know, as literature, but certainly to me. And I think the thing was, Fick, it's, you know, I grew up in the 60s and 70s in West Sussex, in Chichester, where I'm speaking to you now. and I love my home.

And, you know, when I had children of my own, I came back home and everybody lives very close by. My sisters and my brother-in-law lives with us and my mother-in-law, you know, so I love where I live. But it was a very white world, completely white world, really. There were one or two families that had come from other places. But essentially, it was no different from the environment that my father had grown up in 40 years before.

And it meant that many of the discussion, about what race was and racism, I had just simply not had or come across. I can't really believe I was so naive, but I was, you know, very sheltered, very old-fashioned upbringing. And this book, I think, more than any book I've ever read, tells you what racism actually is. And it's the idea that a child cannot,

She can't make sense of the world. She knows it's unfair, and her life is brutal and difficult. And she looks at this pretty white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. And rather than think, well, it's because there is structural racism and the world is not set up fairly, and some people have got power, and some people, of course she doesn't think that. She simply thinks, in the purity and innocence of a child's mind, if I looked like that, my life would be fine. And actually, that's it.

You don't need to say more than that. And I remembered when I'd finished it, just sitting on the bottom of the stairs, weeping, thinking, oh my God, this is the world. That is the structure. That is the system. Yeah, when we talk about systemic racism, when we talk about structural racism, that is the structure that's at play. and as a child your moral compass is actually very pure. Like you get it, you get what's right, what's wrong, and it affects you.

And I just wish we would all still have that as we become adults. We're not conditioned by what we need to do to get by. And I mean, obviously, you know, we're talking about the women's price for nonfiction. We're talking about my nonfiction writing. But I do believe that sometimes a novel can change people's hearts and minds in a way that a piece of nonfiction can't. because mostly, if you like, you know, the joy about being a novelist and writing a novel is that you can slip between the gaps of what people believe and what they think they believe. It's about the imagination. People don't read a book. They don't read Tony Morrison to be told about the structure of the world. They want a piece of politics. They'll read a piece of politics or the newspaper. But when you hold a novel in your hand, you just simply don't know where that's going to take you. And I think that's why this novel has remained so important to me

and I still buy many copies of it every year to give to people when I say, haven't you read, you know, the bluest eye? Because of course she won the Nobel Prize for Beloved and, you know, other extraordinary works. But this was a debut. 1970, this novel came out. I was set in the 40s, but it came out in 1970. And I think it is, you know, it should be on every school,

every politician's reading list, the world over. How many times have you read it? Did you feel like, you know, when you were sitting at the bottom of the stairs, crying because it's affected to you so much, were you taking it all in or were you quite overcome? Did it take a few more reads to really grasp what it was that you were feeling and thinking and being mobilised by it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, but I was scared to go back to it, Vic, to start with, because it had been so significant and it had made me feel so foolish in a way and was very much part of my political and feminist awakening. if you like, in my sort of, you know, when I was kind of 20, when I got to university. And then I thought, I can't go back to it. What if it's not the book that I remember? What if it's, it doesn't shine and shimmer for me anymore? So I didn't read it again for probably 10 years.

You know, it stayed there as this sort of iconic, perfect book on a pedestal. And then, of course, older and, you know, an activist by then and having seen a lot more of the world, I went back to it and I thought, yeah, that is as good as I remember it being. But this time, the second time, of course, I read it for the beauty of her language and her description. I wasn't reading to learn in quite the same sort of way. I was reading to be taken to a completely different place and time and into a young child's head. And since then, I've read it on and off every couple of years. Well, from your awakening as an activist, as a feminist, your understanding of racism, to your literary awakening, how did Tony Morrison influence you as a writer?

When did you decide to be a writer? Oh, my love, you know, I've never decided to be a writer. Nobody really decides to be a writer. You know, I was a publisher. When I left university, I did a lot of theatre and I did a lot of feminism. And in those days, it was consciousness raising and reclaim the night. And the big issue of my generation of feminists was pornography and equal pay and those things which have not gone away. It's disappointing to still need those campaigning boots in your cupboard.

But we do. We know we do. So I left university. And because I was a woman of that age, I had done a secretarial course in my gap year. I met all these people who had been off traveling India in South America and I'd been at home doing a secretarial course and working as a waitress in a cafe.

So, you know, books were the way that I saw the world, really. I hadn't really been anywhere much except, you know, France for holidays and the Channel Islands in the Lake District. Really nowhere much more than that. And so I was sent as a secretary, because in those days, everybody had secretaries. It didn't matter if you were a girl who had gone to university and got a degree. It was expected that that was probably what would happen,

that you would start as the secretary to somebody else. And so I came out of university and signed up with a temporary agency and was sent to a publishing company. And it was great. And I enjoyed myself enormously. And I saw authors coming in. My highlight, I mean, I didn't lose my job, but I might have done, was the new Jeffrey Archie novel was delivered,

on paper, of course, in those days, I dropped it in the post room. It had no page numbers. So I actually think that Jeffrey Archer owes me a lot of money because, you know, I just put it back in the order. It seemed to make sense. So who knows? Physical edit.

I am as you know. I'm really small, but I'm really clumsy. You can assume small people will be delicate, but I'm clumsy, so the fact that I fell down flat of stairs with the new Jeffrey Archer novel, to surprise nobody. But so I just was well. working publishing and then I thought, well, that's it really. What do I want from my life?

And I thought, well, actually, just to, I'd love to be a reader. But of course, it didn't occur to me that was anything you could do. But I thought, well, just being around books and words and people who write them, actually, that is, that's great. So I found myself in publishing, if you like, and worked my way up in publishing and enjoyed it enormously. But then had that experience, which I was offered a really big job. And I had to, and I had my daughter then, she was two, and I was just newly pregnant expecting my son. And I looked hard at myself, and I thought, okay, this is the moment, Kate.

Is what you want from your life to be the head of a publishing company? Because if that is your dream, then you take this job, and you will be tied in, and that's how life will be, And then I thought it isn't. It's not, you know, I had just been doing the job. So I resigned. And at the same time, because I was expecting a baby, I hated being pregnant first time around. My daughter's just had a baby, and she was brilliant at being pregnant, and it was joyous to see her.

But I really hated it, found it very emotionally challenging, as well as physically challenging. And so I thought with the second time, maybe there'll be a book for me. And I looked again in the book that I needed to kind of emotionally taught me through pregnancy, still wasn't there. And an agent friend of mine said, why don't you stop moaning and write it? And I thought, oh, I'll, and sort of huffed off home. And the next day, he says it's not the next day, but the story's better if it's the next day. He rang up and said, I've got your contract with Virago.

And that's how I became a writer. needs must that's how your debut came to fruition yes I mean I had published four books before I was a writer I was still in all of those earlier books

I was a reader who wrote I never I didn't find my voice and I became an overnight success with my fifth book a novel called Labyrinth when I was 45 and nobody could have been more surprised than me but it was a wonderful thing to have success late

I mean, now I'm in my 60s, 45 seems super young. But at the time, you know, I was settled, married with children, living the life I was going to live. And then to suddenly have that moment where you went into a bookshop or more than that, you went into Tesco's. And there was your book on the shelf in the number one slodge. And I can remember standing there with my children thinking, well, who would have thought it? And I think that's been the joy for me that it's not, I've never really made a decision that I'm definitely going to do this in five years time or two years time or ten years time. I've always just thought, take the opportunity that comes and see where it takes you. And if it doesn't work, do something else. And I think that's served me okay. I think so. I'd agree with that.

Those moments, those pieces of literature that just resonate, they can happen at any time. And it takes us on to our second bookshelfy book, which was written by an author at just the age of 19. And it's Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, who was only 19 years old when she wrote her masterful gothic novel about an obsessive scientist and the tragic botched creature he pieces together. It remains a chilling exploration of ambition and responsibility, creation and destruction. What did you love about this book? I think it is one of the great novels of the world, Frankenstein. And, you know, all of this story around the writing of Frankenstein is pretty epic itself anyway.

You know, most people I think know the story that it was the terrible, terrible summer of 1816. And she was with her husband to be. They weren't actually yet married. The poet Shelley on Lake Geneva with Byron and Mary's stepsist. was having an affair with Byron and John Pollydory. And by that stage, I mean, this is what is mind-boggling. By that stage, she had already lost a baby. One of her first child had already died.

And she would go on to lose the next two children before Frankenstein came out. So she had three dead children by the time she was publishing the book in 1818. And it was published anonymously. And of course, because it was known as the year that the sky turned black 1816, because there was a volcano erupting, and everything was just covered in this black kind of smoke. All of Europe was covered in black smoke for most of the summer. And so everything about the atmosphere of this kind of obsessive relationships,

transgressive relationships, and Shelley was actually married at the time, and her step-sister was having an affair with Byron, and they were all there together, and they couldn't go out. So they all challenged each other to tell, one another's story. And I love the idea of that, that this came from young people trying to amuse themselves on a terrible wet summer in Lake Geneva. But once you go further than that, Frankenstein is not only probably the first ever work of science fiction. I think it's often

overlooked as that. It's also clever in ways that are often underestimation. I suppose, that we know it's about a man trying to play God. We know it's about a scientist. We know it's about creature. But it's also about some of the things that were very big at the time that people worried about. It's about disease. It's about illness. It's about sickness.

It's gothic in that it's the duality that gothic fiction thrives on. I write gothic fiction as well. And it's the idea of the balance between light and dark, between the wind and the sun. It's a kind of dualism, and you could almost say like a cathart dualism, going back with that. But for me, I think the most important thing

about Frankenstein is that it's about the consequences of being unloved. Because creature is not this evil monster to begin with. The creature just wants to belong, wants to be like everybody else, and wants to be loved and love in return. And it's only when creature realizes that everybody thinks he's monstrous,

that the thing that keeps the world sane and wonderful, that's to say love, will be denied to him that he goes wild and runs amok. And I think that is what is so significant that this is a book about what happens if you withholding. love. And it is also, I mean, there are many great endings, but the ending when the scientist is on the boat and the captain is, they're going to see him and it is the ultimate ending of creature on the ice flow. And you have moved from this extraordinary descriptions right at the beginning of the novel

in the sort of wet Middle European town with a storm happening to this incredible purity. of ice and water and snow. And there is resolution there. So to have succeeded in that, to have written such an extraordinarily violent and a terrible novel, but also to leave the reader with resolution, the idea that there can be an ending,

even for creature. It is a work of genius, I think. It's exquisite. There can be love. How much do you think the Gothic dualism and this book influenced your own writing? Yes, I would say, you know, I admire Tony Morrison enormously, but I wouldn't say that her writing has influenced mine in any way, really,

because it's not how I write. That's why I love her in a way, because I read, with Mary Shelley, undoubtedly, that sense of the Gothic. It was a period when Gothic fiction was incredibly popular, the biggest selling novel by Miles, of the end of the 18th century was Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Yodolfo, Walpoles, the Castor of Otranto. Many people talk about Lewis's monk.

I don't because I think it's one of the most misogynist and violently anti-women novels I've ever been forced to read. And then Frankenstein comes slightly at the end of that. And Gothic fiction, you can see that it is the tipping of the old world into the new world, that we are leaving that kind of not the joy of the 18th century, quite, but this repressive going into the Victorian period. There was much more enlightenment, if you like, at the end of the 18th century than there was about to be in the 19th century.

And Mary Shelley's part in that, as a Gothic writer, had a huge influence on me, as did almost all the Gothic fiction. You know, I go on to say, Wilkie Collins, the woman in white, Daphne de Morier's Rebecca, you have the haunting-a-fell house, and you have all of those extraordinary Gothic. short story writers, Elginon Blackwood and Amr James, Henry James even. But I would say Mary Shelley, of all of them, had the biggest influence on me. And I read the novel when I was too young really to understand it.

But again, it's a novel that I reread time and again just to be reminded what can be achieved in such a tiny piece of work. It's not even very long. You've said that the impetus for a lot of your fiction, it comes from the landscape. How do ideas initially come to you? How do they evolve? It's what I always call Vic the whispering in the landscape. All of my fiction, my historical fiction, which is the bedrock of what I write,

but also my Gothic fiction and ghost story fiction, comes from a belief, my own belief, that a particular story can only happen in a particular place. If you like, it's that the magic, that triangle between story, place in history and in between those three pillars if you like lies imagination and so for me when I first went to Cacasson in 1989 and we bought a tiny house there in the shadow of the medieval city walls I didn't intend to write about the southwest of France I didn't know anything about it we were there because my wonderful mother-in-law was working for somebody who was twinned with an estate

agent in Cacasson and I've often thought I mean God, if she'd been twinned within a state agent, and Bogner, probably wouldn't have been I'm allowed to say that because I used to live in Bogner. So, you know, I can make the Bogner joke. But it was being there and walking around and seeing the history that is everywhere, this beautiful landscape. And when you read the history, it's, you know, it's a green landscape that's soaked in blood. You know, the history of the region, it's there on, you know, in the face of every cliff,

every mountain, every lake, the garieg, the kind of the wildlands, the, you know, between the mountains and the sea. And little by little, a story started to come to me in Kakasun. And then I realized, and I was doing that thing. I was thinking, God, why can't I remember what happened next? And I thought, oh, you can't remember, Kate, because this is your story. You're making something up here. And that's how it always is for me. You know, the ghost ship that I'm writing at the moment, It's that sense of listening and thinking about the shape and the creek and the lilt of a boat. And that closed environment of that with Carcassonne or with the burning chambers, it's about being in a particular place and imagining all those voices.

And I think it comes down to, when I'm walking somewhere at home in Sussex in the Downs or on the Fishbourne Marshes or anywhere, it's the idea of all the people who have walked this path before me and will walk this path after me. So if you like, they are friendly ghosts in the landscape for me. And landscape is therefore the lead character of all of my books, really. But there are some places that don't speak to me. So I love New York, for example, but the voices are silent there. There's no story for me there.

And there are places like Tarascon, which is down in the Pyrenees, where we always went in the summer and that place was silent to me until we went in winter. And when we went in the winter, immediately I could hear the sound of a young man grieving the loss of his brother

in the First World War and a young woman who had died hundreds of years before in the Cathar extirpation, if you like. And immediately I knew that that book became the winter ghosts which were just working on the screenplay

at the moment. But it was exactly that, the balance that stories, if you like, the land holds the truth of history. 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 hands of more people. Looking for a treat to pair with your favourite book,

Bayleys is the perfect accompaniment to enjoy either over ice or over coffee. Your third bookshelfy book is Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, a collection of provocative poems that move with the power of American feminist poet, essayist and activist, Adrienne Rich's distinctive voice. In these poems, Rich searches to reclaim what has been forgotten, lost or unexplored, particularly within women's histories. I was introduced to Adrienne Rich at university, and I did a very old-fashioned English degree where you couldn't really get very up to date, nothing much beyond the Brontes, if you were lucky.

And there were almost no women at all. But there was this one breath of fresh air, if you like, which was the American Literature Option paper. And I dived into that because there were things that were more modern on there. And Adrienne Rich was there, and it was one of her extraordinary volumes of nonfiction. She's an essayist, a polemicist,

incredibly important lesbian feminist voice, American voice of the 50s, 60s and 70s. And this particular collection of poetry diving into the wreck, anyone who's read any of my books will know that you'll be very lucky to get away without me quoting Adrian Ridge somewhere. Either as an epigraph at the beginning or, you know, pretty much every book I managed to shoehorn in a quotation because I think she has a beauty of language. that in three or four words can pick you up from where you are and set you down in a completely different time and place. You know, the texture, the grit, the heat, the cold,

the environment that she wants you to be in. And her poetry is political. It's about what it means to be a woman, what it means to discover your sexual identity, what it means to be a lesbian mother, what it means to be in America during the Vietnam War and looking on from the outside and seeing the destruction that a certain point of view or a certain sort of attitude has. And this particular, the poems were written in

71, 72, but it won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. And she was shortlisted alongside two other great lesbian poets and writers of the age, Alice Walker and Audrey Lord. And the three women decided that whoever won, they would write a joint statement and the person who won would read it out. And they read out the statement, which begins that they're reading it on behalf of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world. Now, I chose this, and I know not everybody enjoys reading poetry. And I think a lot of us become attached to particular poets when we're younger and don't necessarily investigate newer writing. But I think that there are many really challenging issues

in feminism at the moment. But you know what? There always have been. And I think it's really crucial that feminists of my generation absolutely listen to younger voices, but also that we listen to older voices. Because when I was writing warrior queens and quiet revolutionaries, what I discovered was that

Much of what my generation and the generation before had fought for was so taken for granted that people had forgotten that there was always a moment where women need to stand shoulder to shoulder and keep talking about our rights and protecting those rights. And these poems do precisely that. There's this wonderful phrase which has been an inspiration for all of my writing about how history is written. And it's a book of myths in which our names do not occur.

here. Now that's precisely what I'm writing about now. But that was a phrase that I came across, you know, when I was 1819. This collection is about diving into the wreck. It's about having a reckoning with your innermost self. Do you remember doing that when you first read this or on rereadings? I think what is so powerful about that. Yes, absolutely. But I think what's most powerful is is understanding that when you listen to someone like Adrian Rich, and I say listen because there are many recordings of her reading her own work, and I find that very moving. She died in 2012, but we can still hear her voice, is that what I learned from Rich, from her nonfiction writing,

as well as all her volumes of poetry, was the power of hope. and that there is this quite active determination to drive a wedge between women. And some of that is political, but a lot of it is financial, and it is always about those in power not wishing to share it. It's very rarely ideological. I mean, sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. And I learned from Rich that women, don't have to agree with each other just because they're women. And this is so important for anyone

listening at the moment who might feel a little bit demoralised by some of the things that are going on in the world about women's rights and women's voices being lost and shouted down, is that we're allowed to think differently. But what you can always do is listen. And that, I think, is a message that has been lost in these very aggressive times. We are in, you know, we are in the end times at the moment. You know, history is a pendulum. It swings backwards and it swings forwards. And there are periods when the world seems to stutter and rock on its access.

And we are in that period of time now for all sorts of reasons. But what this collection of poems, for me, still does, is say the domestic matters just as much. The old 70s mantra, the personal is political. but that in the end we can travel hopefully, that if we stand shoulder to shoulder, sisterhood works. And I include boys and men in that.

You know, this is about patriarchy is a system that benefits almost no men either, just a handful. We know that. So this is not about men versus women. This is about a system that is designed to leave most of us without a voice, which is poetry,

I'm feeling a little bit. You know, you know, Vic, I'm very perky and optimistic by nature, but even I have been slightly tried recently with the way things are. But all I need to do is pick up this volume of poetry and read some of the words in it. And I think she knew then, and things will change again. And we just need to look forward. You know, it's the lovely T.S. Elliot phrase, fair forward voyager. That's what we must do. forward hopefully and when everyone seems to be shouting try to listen you mentioned your book warrior queens and quiet revolutionaries which of course highlights a thousand women in history what motivated you to write that kate everything everything um in a way yeah everything um i was publishing the second

book of the Jubair Family Chronicles into the lockdown. And I like, I really love readers. I love meeting readers. I like audiences. I like big out and about because I believe that a book is only finished when it's in the hands of the reader. You know, I write it and I pass it over and you take it. And it's that moment of connection that makes the book come to life. And that's often the moment at which you kind of know what kind of book it is you've written. You know, it takes flight. It has wind under its wings. And so I was going to be denied that. And that was depressing, you know, and so I thought, well, I'll just do something. So I asked a few writer friends. If they could just name me one woman from history, they thought should be better known or who they wanted to

celebrate. So Paula Hawkins said, the great French lawyer, Simone Vile. Anthony Horowitz said the Greek leader of the War of Independence in the 19th century, Laskarina Bubulina, who is just a cracking and brilliant person. Lee Child said the women of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. Professor Kate, William said Murasaki Shikibu, who is credited with being the first person to write a novel. The first novel was written by a woman, a Japanese woman in the 13th century.

Claire Balding said, do you know Lily Parr, Kate, the great English footballer, scored more of a thousand goals in her professional career. And the Boxing Day match in, I think it was 1918, between the two women's teams, Dick Car Ladies and their big rivals, was watched by 48,000 people. So I just thought, well, this is fantastic. And we were still in lockdown. So I put the same question out on Twitter. and it's the only time in my entire career that I have trended for being the right to Cape Moss.

And I trend every year on the beginning of January when people wish me a happy birthday, but it's the other one as a January birthday. But it's interested in mind's the 20th of October. So feel free. And what happened was that within days, thousands of people from all over the world, men as well as women, had responded to the time. tweet and I loved it because firstly it showed me that most people want to build up rather than pull down, that most people want to be positive and celebrate rather than criticize and if you like

destroy or humiliate. And so I got a tweet from a young woman in China saying, do you know the Chinese poet Ding Ling who was, you know, lived many years imprisoned by the communist regime in China? I didn't. I got another one from a young woman in Saudi Arabia saying, do you know the great Egyptian feminist, Huda Shawawi, who had come back from the women's suffrage conference in 1923, and took off her veil at Cairo Railway Station. And here we are, nearly 100 years later,

having the same conversation about women's right to wear what they want to wear. So I just suddenly thought, my God, I have lived in this world of women's history, of writing about underheard and unheard women's stories all of this time, but I haven't heard of most of these women. So that's extraordinary. Now, of course, I'm a writer and I was in lockdown. What else am I going to do but start to put a book together?

But there was one key thing that changed this for me. And it was discovering this that my great-grandmother was a really famous novelist. in her day. And I did not know. It's extraordinary to me. I knew there was somebody in my family who had written, but it was always described in that way, you know, as if it was a little bit of a hobby in the background, not something serious. I thought I was, you know, treading new ground as a novelist in a family of vickers and teachers. But no, Lily Watson, born in 1849, and who died in 1932, wrote 14 novels. She wrote hundreds of novels. articles for girls and paper. She wrote devotional tracks. She wrote poetry. And one

her most famous novel, the Vicar of Langthwaite published in 1893, the Prime Minister himself, Gladstone, wrote to the papers to say it is to be celebrated that there is a new novel from the great Lily Watson. And so this just gave me, if you like, the personal story to write this book. I wanted to celebrate all these extraordinary women, but it's a detective story. Yeah, of your own history. To my own family history, how could I know? No. And then, of course, within that, I discovered there was a great tragedy in my family that, again, I knew nothing about. And it was that on that side of the family, my father's side of the family, that all of Lily's son, she had six children, they were 20 years apart. All of her sons had heavophilia. Her youngest son died when he was only 12. She sat beside his bed for three days as he faded, all by one of her brothers died. from hemophilia. And I rang up my cousin,

who had given me quite a lot of the letters between Lily and our husband, Sam. And I said, I've just discovered this extraordinary family tree with a green H next to some names. And I realised that means that they were hemophilia in a red sea next to others,

and that means that they were a carrier. And my cousin, who's older than me, she said, oh, I know, Kate, I had to be tested. And again, it's just the book is a love letter a history, Warrior Queens. It's not just about the extraordinary women that have been left out of history or their work misattributed to the men who they worked alongside or who came after them, but it's also the idea of why history matters and how easy it is for us to be told only part of the story. And of course, that's not only the case with women. Of course it isn't. It's the case with

almost every black person, another person of colour. It's the case with many people of different genders and different identities. It's the case with most people with disabilities or different faiths. So it's just that idea that history matters. We need to shine a spotlight on all of it because guess what we were all there too. The world are beautiful, even when it's a bit challenged world, was built by us all. And that's why this book matters such a lot to me, not just playing detective and connecting with my own family history, but just also. saying, we need to tell the truth because history is used in the present day to justify persecution now. Let's move on now to your fourth book, which is Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie.

As soon as she moves into her new home, Gwenda knows there's something strange going on. A sealed room, a hidden door, the specter of a young woman being strangled. As Gwenda's friend, Jane Marple investigates, the answer seems to. in a crime committed nearly 20 years ago. How come you pick this book? Tell us a little bit about it. Oh, I love your digest. That was brilliant.

I am, you know, obviously we've been talking seriously about many things, but I read a huge amount of crime fiction. I love crime fiction. And during lockdown, I read, I think, 260 detective stories during the period that we were all in our house. and she's still the queen. Agatha Christie is still the queen. And Miss Marple is an unsung feminist hero. She is always underestimated. She's always there. She only appears in 12 novels and a handful of short stories, but she's one of those characters that stepped out of a book

on, you know, to the world stage in a way like I suppose Frankenstein has or the artful Dodger or Heathcliff and Kathy. And this is my favorite Miss Marple. It's essentially a recovered memory detective story. Very, very modern. Agatha Christie wrote it at some time in the early part of the Second World War. We're not sure exactly when. And she wrote a Poirot at the same time.

And they were put in a vault in case she died during the war. And so this novel actually came out in 1976 after Agatha Christie had died. So it was published posthumously, but written much earlier, and it's set in the 30s. And it's just one of those clever spooky stories. So when Gwenda goes to this house, she's, you know, she's a young New Zealander,

she's newly married, she's been sent ahead by her husband to find a suitable house for them to live in somewhere on the South Coast, you know, could be doors at Devon, you know, that part of the world that Christy knew and loved so well. And she, she's never been in England before, so she thinks. But what she does when she gets to the house, it's just brilliant, I'm not going to spoil it, but she sees a house and she thinks that looks great. That looks like a house I can see myself living in. And she goes there and is looking around and she's shown around and that all seems very straightforward.

And then she goes into a room and she's thinking, well, maybe if this was my room, I would put that wallpaper, you know, this particular flower pattern. And then she opens a cupboard and there is that wallpaper. And of course, a shiver goes down the reader's spine and it goes down Gwenda's spine. but she kind of puts it aside and her husband comes over. And then she is, they get the house and it all seems fine.

And then she's redoing the garden. And she keeps it so stupid, there should be some steps there, you know. And then when she gets the gardener to dig, there are the steps. So of course, little by little, we realise that Gwenda has been there before. And she has no memory of this, but she remembers something. And it's a story, is a crime story about, you don't necessarily get caught at the time that it can be dangerous

to stir up your memories because of course a crime committed in the past could be a crime committed in the present and little by little with Miss Marple's help of course she pieces together not only what happened but who is responsible for what happened it's the perfect crime novel for people who've not read any Miss Marple

you've got to read this one first. Then you read all the others because she's a genius. But just start with this one. It's got everything that you need. It's got jeopardy. It's got a classical illusion. It's got memory. It's got a sense of a lost England.

And a brilliant, brilliant and awful crime at the heart of it. Just masterful. Absolutely masterful. You yourself have written a Miss Marple story. What was it like trying to write such a beloved character? Well, you know, it was brilliant for it because actually, firstly, we all did the same. We all became, it was a group of us, and included people like Lucy Foley and Val McDermott and Gene Quock and Ellie Griffiths, Ruth Ware. And we all became, we all felt we were like the mopperites, you know, some sort of superannuated 60s.

I love that, the mopulites. We were like, hey, we are really part of this. And we all felt the same, which was that it was an enormous honour to be. be asked to write Miss Marple, but it had to be Christie's Marple. And we were given quite a tight brief, so it couldn't be set outside any of the time period of the stories that Christy herself wrote, which meant that, of course, none of us could write Jane as a young girl, which, of course, I was immediately really keen on that. I'm sure everybody else would have been the same. We weren't allowed to give her love interest, and I was thrilled by that, because one of Miss Marple's

extraordinary character. She's a very rare iconic female character in literature that exist entirely on her own terms, not because of her relationship with other people. She's not a mother. She's never been married. She's not who she is because her heart was broken. She is herself. And so I was really delighted that we weren't allowed to do that. I wouldn't have done that anyway, but they clearly didn't want, you know, Jane Marple to turn into a lesbian pirate or something completely different. And she wasn't allowed to meet Poirot. So that was it. You know, we were given these things, but apart from that.

And so I could then lie around, reread every Christie where Marple appeared. And when people said, what are you doing, Kate? I'd say, I'm working. This is research, you know, lying on the sofa, eating chocolate and reading Miss Marple. And it was wonderful. And I really enjoyed doing it. And it's given me, I've always read a lot of crime. But it's made me think, when I finished the Jubair Family Chronicles,

there's a fourth book to go after the ghost ship. I think I might turn my hand to a bit of crime fiction. Well, you've said previously... I heard it here first. I know, it's a little exclusive on the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. Thank you very much. You're welcome. You've said previously that when you're writing, the only thing that you can read is Agatha Christie.

Why is that? Well, you know, I think I can read other golden ages as well. So I mean, Nio Marsh, the Great New Zealand writer, for example, Josephine Té, Marjorie, Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, you know, that amazing golden age of British and, well, I suppose, Commonwealth crime writing, as it would have been called at the time. And it's because I've read them all before, Vic. When I'm writing, I can't read anything new. I'm really fortunate, and you know what it's like. You know, every year I get to hear about the most outstanding fiction written by

women in English from everywhere in the world. And I have, there are so many extraordinary writers working today. But when I'm in a book myself, I need to keep my character safe, if you like. I need to keep them close to me. I need their voices to be the only voices that I'm getting in my head. I can't be either looking at other people's work and becoming demoralised because they're so brilliant or equally reading something that kind of knocks me off course. But equally, I can't go to sleep if I don't read, even a few pages. So I just rereading. So I just rereading. read all the golden age, in particular Agatha Christie on a loop. And because I'm crashing my deadline, I'm nearly run out. I'm going to have to start again with the mysterious

ferret styles. And this, therefore, the ghost ship will be the first two Agatha Christie novels read during the time of writing. Disastrous. Well, all this aside, what I have taken from this is I can very much look forward to your crime novels coming soon. Soon-ish. Soon-ish. clarify. Your fifth and final book this week is This is Not a Pity Memoir by Abby Morgan. This memoir from award-winning screenwriter and playwright is about the tragic illness, collapse, coma and reawakening of Abby's husband. But the book resolutely refuses to rely on platitudes or sentiment. It is a poignant and heartbreaking, but also often very funny meditation on love, grief and hope. Why did you pick this book?

Well, we've been talking about nonfiction and we've been talking about our dreams for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction and what that could mean. And I can't imagine a book that would be more suitable to win the new Women's Prize for Nonfiction than this memoir. This is not a pity memoir.

Now, Abby Morgan, people will know from sex traffic, from Brick Lane, from shame, from suffragette, the iron lady, but she's, this is her first book. And what I got from this book is how to write a personal story in such a way that it is both specific and universal. So it starts very straightforwardly. You know, she is an incredibly busy woman. Her husband is very busy.

They have two children and a dog. And she, her husband's been not that well, but not. seriously ill. And everybody's a bit frustrated and running late in the morning like the usual sort of thing. And just a normal morning. But when she comes home, she discovers her husband is lying on the floor of the bathroom, has had an enormous episode and it's not clear at that stage precisely what's happened to him. And everything about her world, of course, is immediately thrown upside down. If it was just that, you'd think, well, I've read books about this.

It's a book about resilience and it's a book about fortitude. But what Morgan does, which I think is really exceptional in a memoir like this, is that she puts everything down on the page. So she doesn't glamourise herself

and she doesn't glamourise the situation. Every mistake that she thinks she made in how she dealt with everything, she puts on the page. She is a very harsh critic of herself. But what she does for all of us is to say this is what real life is like. This is not the world of Hollywood or BBC drama or a novel where all the loose ends get tied up. So there is a devastating thing that she has her own really serious health issue that she's dealing with.

She's trying to cope with her two young children. And finally, after a long period of time, her husband does recover enough to look as if he's going to live. except then he doesn't know who she is. It's just absolutely devastating. I gasped out loud when I got to that. I didn't know the story of what had happened. But I think it's also about how people keep going,

how if something happens in your life that is so traumatic, human beings are extraordinary. They keep going. They somehow manage. And of course, no surprise. this book is exquisitely written. It's light, it's very, very funny in parts. It is lyrical.

It is beautiful. It is structured in such a way that oddly you can pick it up and put it down and pick it up again and still feel that you left Abby and her family just exactly where you left them last time you were reading. And I think it is, I mean, not just for people who have suffered a great loss or a tragedy or are going through something like this. I'm a carer, as you know, and have spent a lot of time in hospitals and at bedside,

not knowing if someone is going to make it through. But I think it also is, it should be given to everybody who ever wants to write personally, to put themselves on the page. Because if you can't do it like this, then if you can't learn from a book like this, then you'll never be able to do it.

It is quite literally a masterclass in how to write a memoir. It is really one of the best memoirs I've ever read. And of course, it comes needless to say, because of who she is, with comments from, you know, people like Carrie Mulligan and Meryl Streep. Wow. And, of course, many of them had no idea she was going through all of this when they were working with her. So she's an extraordinary woman.

It sounds absolutely brilliant and it sounds so powerful. You mentioned there yourself. having been being a full-time carer, you wrote an extra pair of hands about this experience. Why did you want to put that experience on the page? Well, you know what, Vic? Because carers were everywhere, hidden in plain sight. And I was asked to write it by the Wellcome Trust

because they have a campaign every year, Carers UK. And the campaign for that particular year was making caring visible and valued. It's the lowest of any of the statutory benefits that people have. Many people have to give up their job. I've become a carer. I'm really fortunate. I'm a writer.

I work here. Granny Rosie is in the next door room from where we're recording this. And in a moment, she'll be coming in, and I'll hear the creak of her wheelchair, because she will be wondering where her lunchtime gin and tonic is. And, you know, it's overdue. And she's wonderful, and I'm caring for somebody that I love very, very dearly. but many people are caring for people that they don't even know. You know, they're caring for someone who maybe married their mother or their father.

There are many young carers. There are millions of young people, girls and boys who can't go to school a lot of the time for fear of what they will find when they get home. And it's without carers. The country collapses. No. And so it really matters. And it's not a sexy subject.

Politicians can get away with doing nothing about it because nobody thinks about it until they're in the position. So I just felt if I could write a book, it felt quite counterintuitive to me to put myself on the page. I found that quite challenging, actually. My parents are both gone, so I had to make an assessment of what I thought they would be happy for me to share and whatnot.

Granny Rosie was here, and she was adorable. She kept reading it as if it was all news to her. I would say, well, no, are you? Are you happy with this? Oh, God, you know, it should be wrapped in the book when he was reading it before I sent it to the publisher. But it, you know, we all think about these things. I write about this stuff in my fiction all the time. But it's important to think about living and dying.

It's important to think about who we are. I think the sign of a good society is how it cares for the people who need it the most, not the people who need it the least. And I think that that morality about, caring for one another, whether it is a full-time caring or part-time caring or even just keeping an eye up for your neighbour, is again something that is underestimated. And we should all be celebrating all of the people who do it. Carers are extraordinary. And, you know, it's been the biggest decision about deciding to do a tour and go on my one-woman show was, could I, could I allow

myself to do that and not be at home full-time? And we all sat down and talked about it. My brother and nor lives with us as well, with my husband and Granny Rosie. And everybody said, you've got to give it a go. And for me, that's what it's all about is, you know, you can't just do the same thing. You can't just, you know, put your slippers on and think you've done your bit. You just need to keep trying new things. And it's the great Samuel Beckett quote that's always misquoted. Try again, fail again. Never mind. fail better. Now obviously I hope the tour is going to be a massive success

and I'm going to be fun to see me but I you know it wasn't the fear of putting myself out there that made me hesitate. It was like can I can I afford this time away from home? Well you are of course a playwright just like Abby Morgan as well as a writer

and now also about to go on your one woman tour of the country you're celebrating Warrior Queens and quiet revolutionaries. What is the show going to be? be like Kate? It's going to be a great night out. That's my goal.

I mean, I'm not saying this is a perfect hen party show. No, what it's going to be is it's going to be with music and with lights and with props and a stage set. It is going to be a show. And I'm going to be celebrating 12 of the most extraordinary women from the book, including Bonnie and Reid, to the legendary pirates and also Lily Parr, the extraordinary English footballer, who is the only woman footballer who has a statue to her at the National Football Museum in Preston.

And I'll be weaving the story of my great-grandmother through it, and I'll be asking everybody every night to join in to make this enormous library of women. There's nearly a thousand women in the book, but there could be millions. Oh, there's more. There will always be more. Everywhere ago, someone says,

but what about, and I go, oh my God. So I'm going around the country. I've got, I think, 32 dates. I'm starting in Stafford. And I love that. I love traveling around the UK. I'm really looking forward to hearing local stories and picking up new tip bits of local folklore

and seeing parts of the country. I don't know so well. But mostly, I'm just looking forward to being in a theatre with audiences. And when everybody leaves each night, everybody putting down on a, I don't know how we're going to, going to do it, a bit of paper or some electronic wizardry, no doubt, the woman they want to

put up on that board. So that by the end of the tour, there's thousands more women. It sounds amazing. Kate, I have one more question for you before I let you get back to your pirates. If you had to choose just one book from your list as a favourite, which one would it be and why? Oh, now, of course, the one book that I always list is a book that I didn't choose. So that's, that flaws me to start with. Are you asking me to bend the rules here? I mean, if I can't bend the rules, I don't know who can. No, I mean, I would.

My sixth book would be Wuthering Heights, and that's also my first book. But I think of the ones that I've shared with you, I think, In the end, I would take diving into the wreck because I think that there is something timeless about poetry and transcendent about poetry. And I would be awful on my own. I would really hate that. I wouldn't, you know, want to be stuck anywhere, even with all the books in the world for very long without other people to talk to. but something about poetry just speaks to your heart, doesn't it? It speaks to your emotion and it connects you so absolutely with all of the versions of yourself that you've been going back right to your youngest days. And so I think I'd have to have that.

I'd have to have diving into the wreck by Adrienne Rich. Well, from diving into the wreck, I'm going to let you dive right back into your deadline. Wish you the best of luck meeting that. And just thank you so much for sharing. sharing so much with us today. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Vic. I'm Vic Hope, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayley's and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.