Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep6: Bookshelfie: Adjoa Andoh

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Actor, producer and director Adjoa Andoh covers everything from Bridgerton to reincarnation and tells us why she doesn’t care about fame.  Coined ‘the undisputed queen of audio and radio drama�� by Penguin Random House, Adjoa is now better known for her leading role as Lady Danbury in Bridgerton. For 30 years she was a BBC Radio actor, and was a welcome addition to popular TV shows like Doctor Who, Eastenders and Casualty. Her theatre credits are extensive, including Great Expectations and A Streetcar Named Desire, and her film credits include her role as Mandela’s secretary in Invictus. She’s recorded over 150 audiobooks, she is an Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Senior Associate Artist at The Bush Theatre, a Fairtrade Ambassador and runs her own  production company, Swinging the Lens. Adjoa’s book choices are:  ** Just William by Richmal Crompton  ** Green Darkness by Anya Seton ** A Question of Power by Bessie Head ** After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys ** Beloved by Toni Morrison  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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit cfir.com. Anything that gets in the way of us being in the joy of the miracle of our lives. And the pigeons are good. I love that, as you said that, those birds just look at it. That's right. Nature's a beautiful thing. And that's the other thing. 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 Vic Hope and I'm your. your brand new host for season five of the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, the podcast 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 for 2022. I guarantee you'll be taking away plenty of reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to today's episode of Bookshelfy. I'm Vic Hope and I'm so excited to be a host this season. Also, excitingly, this year's Women's Prize shortlist is out now. And the six amazing authors and their books can all be found on our website, wwwwomenesspriceforfiction.co.uk. Coined the undisputed queen of audio and radio drama by Penguin Random House, today's guest is now better known for her leading role as Lady Danbury in Bridgeton. That's right. I'm joined today by Adjua and Ope.

For 30 years, she was a BBC radio actor and was a welcome edition to popularity. TV shows like Doctor Who, EastEnders and Casualty. Her theatre credits are extensive, including great expectations and a streak car name desire. And her film credits are equally as impressive. Her role as Mandela's secretary in Invictus being one of her best known. Not only is she a familiar face, but her voice over work has made her even more recognisable. She's recorded over 150 audio books, which definitely makes her the perfect guest for this podcast. And of course, Adjua is an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company,

senior associate artist at the Bush Theatre and a fair trade ambassador. Thank you so, so much for joining me today, Adjua. How are you? I'm a bit tired, Vic, to be honest. I'm, no, I'm good, I'm very good. I'm also the Cameron McIntosh visiting professor of contemporary theatre. So last weekend I was in Oxford and I was running workshops for, I think, I think we had about 140 students on theatre and belonging and who gets to tell the story. That's the stuff I'm really interested in.

I've got a production company called Swinging the Lens. And all I'm really interested in doing for the rest of my life is swinging the lens on stories. So, you know, the thing we've just had with Partygate and the Sue Gray report, I'm interested in the cleaners and the security guards that got abused by, drunk politicians doing what they shouldn't have been doing in the first place. So, you know, if I was swinging the lens on the story, I don't care about those politicians. I want to know, I want to know about the, what happened to the staff, you know, the guy who died of COVID because they had to come in, the guy who was sacked because he was isolating.

And then these people are getting abused by people who shouldn't even be in the building. So, yeah, that's kind of what I want to do with my work. Well, talking about swinging the lens and who gets to tell the story, you know, the women's Price of Fiction is all about owning our voices, having control, having agency over the stories that we should be telling for ourselves. Why is that important to you? It's really basic. We all want to be seen and we want to be heard. Well, being seen and being heard is about hearing, having your story, listened to, being told, seeing yourself reflected in the world around you. It's sort of basic. That's what everybody wants. That's the whole

world wants. And, you know, we get, we get things chucked at us like, oh, you're being woke by people who really shouldn't use that word. You know, you've got a chip on your shoulder. Oh, you're always complaining about something. But the fact is, if you were a white man and you lived your whole life, you know, as a minority in a country, say you lived in Ghana where my father's from, as a, you're very conscious of your, of your difference. And the point is that this country has been built on the accomplishments of lots of people and lots of people from across the world because it's a trading nation. And, you know, that needs to be acknowledged in the way that the world works.

And particularly, women are more than 50% of the world. You know, there's a petition going around at the moment that I haven't signed yet, but I'm going to sign, which is all about older women in narratives, film, TV, whatever, not having the same access to the story as young women, and men of all ages. It's almost as if the minute the wound dries up,

then the interest dries up. I do think we function at that real animal level in some way. But actually, who is the largest viewing public? Who buys more theatre tickets, cinema tickets, listens to more drama on the radio, You name it women over 40. So it's like the people who are paying the most attention are receiving the least attention.

So between being a woman and a woman of colour, you know, we have to push quite hard to get the stories. Yeah. Storytelling is a part of that. You're a brilliant storyteller. And you've brought so many books and texts to life. But where do books fit into your life? Have you always been a big reader outside of work?

Yeah. Yeah. When I was, I remember being introduced to a friend of my grandmother, my mother, who's English, her mother, a lady called Daphne, friend of Nana's. And Daphne arrived in lemon, twin set and pearls, the snowy perm, immaculate snowy perm. And I do remember looking at her, I must have been about, I must have been three or just under. I remember looking at her and thinking, I have to make her like me. Well, that's a whole other psychodrama about why does a three-year-old think that? but I knew what I needed to do.

I needed to go upstairs and get my copy of Mrs. Tiggie Winkle by Beatrix Potter and come downstairs and plonk myself in this woman's lap and then proceed to read the whole of Mrs. Tiggi Winkle. And you knew that would make her like you? I knew that would be it. Why would you not like a greeneroy to read you can read you the whole of the Beatrix Potter story about a hedgehog? I've books.

My father was a journalist in Ghana. he wasn't a journalist here he couldn't get a job here as a journalist in the 50s and so literature and writing my mother is a voracious reader I remember the day I was old enough for my mother to agree to give me one of her adult library tickets

because I'd read all the children's stuff and I was just annoyed because I wasn't old enough to get an adult ticket so every week I would have one precious adult library ticket and I could get my kids books and I could go and get an adult book as well. So yeah, love books. And our library used to be in a mobile van that used to come to our village. Yeah, we had that. You know what? I completely relate. I remember feeling really hard done by that. I couldn't read the adult books. I was about three years old,

really precocious child from Mrs. Tigger Winkle, from that Beatrix Potter that you were so adamant. You had to show your ability at reading. As you moved through life, what books did you then gravitate towards as you got older? I loved Enid Blyton when I was a kid because I loved adventure stories. I loved being able to get lost in a different world. And I even started, we had our own, I think we were the famous four. There was only me and the Ryan children. My brother would.

So I made us all a membership books and we would go and have adventures. In my village, writing down car number plates was an adventure because not. Not many people had cars and not many went through the village. Yes, and we'd try and solve mysteries. There weren't that many. We found a key once and it belonged to the village hall. Anyway, so I loved, I loved those books. I just didn't pay attention to all the foreigners of baddies.

All the stuff you pick up on later. My father loved a paperback gum shoe thriller. So we had all this sort of, we had Dashil Hammer and all the crime, the great American crime writers. And so I got reading those. I also, my mom was a history teacher, so I grew up reading a lot of historical fiction, which was my sex education, frankly.

Well, yes, they all racy at times. Georgette Heyer, Jean Plady, all of those people. I didn't really come across black authors, African heritage authors, Caribbean authors, Asian heritage authors, until I was older. That just wasn't really, We had, everybody had the readers digest, you know, the row of leatherbound Regist Digest Books.

So you could read, do you know what these are, readers digest books? Yeah. And you could read the shortened version of lots of stories in them. You know, you could read all the classic stories, the Dickens and the Defoe's and the Robert Louis Stevenson and all those big. So I sort of grew up on those sort of classic adventure stories, really. Well, let's zoom in now from these abridged anthologies into your bookshelf. Your first bookshelfy book is just William by Richel Malkton.

Let's say 1922's version of Horrid Henry. William Brown is a scruffy troublemaker who causes chaos wherever he goes. This is the first in this 38 book series of children's books, where William's gang, the outlaws, have planned a super cool day out. There's just one problem, though. William is meant to be babysitting. So, of course, the best and only solution is to bring the baby with him. How come you've chosen this?

I could have chosen any of them, frankly. I read Just William stories to all my kids. So all my kids have grown up and I would do all the voices. And I have to say, I love Martin Jarvis. Martin Jarvis is, he is the Just William voice. But I really want to, I'm making a bid here for reading. the Richmore Crumpton books because I think people forget that Richmore Crumpton is a woman. I think people think it's some sort of name that's a bit like Richard.

Yeah, they might. It might do. She is hilarious. It's actually 100 years this year from the first book, I think, to 2024. It is, yeah. 1924. And I just think about her observations on these, not just the kids, but the long-suffering parents and the older glamorous sister and the neighbours and the people in the town.

And the adventures remind me for it. So I was growing up in the Cotswolds in the 1960s. So adventures happen on a you make your adventure yourself scale. There's nobody, you know, there's no adventure playground to go to or exciting immersive worlds apart from nature and your imagination. So we, you know, we were climbing trees. we were playing by the river, by the swimming in the, in the quarry and going into the scary building that people said there were ghosts in it. It was just a broken down building, but you dare yourself and you go in there looking for scorpions, you know, following people who we

thought might be bad people, but were probably just elderly people. Going into that, going into that house where there was a man who would give you toffies and they had sherbet him, but all the children you don't go in on your own, only going in groups, but we had to have the toffies because sweets were like gold. Well, they were. That was the treasure. That was the treasure. So I sort of really resonated with William. I love his disrespect for authority. I love how he always manages to make himself right in any given circumstance. And the way he's so flexible, so, you know, taking the baby, who is supposed to be babysitting with them on all their adventures, cows and prams getting stuck in fields and all sorts of things.

Loathing Violet Elizabeth Bot with her girlish ways. I too loathed girlish ways. I wanted people that were biffy and adventurous. And I just love the way Richmore Compton pokes fun at. She's with William. She's always on William's side. And you know that. As a kid reading, you know that, you know, this story is for you.

It's not for adults reading about a child. It's absolutely for you. But she writes in a way that's absolutely for the child in every adult. So you can enjoy it at any stage in your life. And the people in the world around are hilarious as well. So yeah, I just, I wanted to be in Williams gang. What kind of books do your kids enjoy reading? Well, they had to, obviously they had to go with all the books that mummy agreed to.

My eldest daughter has a book podcast, actually. she's a teacher. She's worked in bookshop since she was 16. She teaches French and German. And she lives, French and German, French and Spanish. I did French and German. She lives in Cambodia. Her husband's a diplomat. And they lived in Tanzania before that. So Jesse Ando is her name. And she's got a book podcast project on the go. She's reading a book from every country in the world written by a woman. This is a bit of me, this is. I'm writing it down. Yeah. So just Google Jesse. She might be Jesse or she might be under her married name, which is Thayer. I've done her book podcast.

I mean, she's literally, she's done hundreds, and it's one book by a woman from each country in the world. Yes. Well, that's what I studied at uni was French, Spanish and Portuguese, and specialised in literature. So this is right up my street. I love this. Yeah. Thank you for the recommendation.

Very much. So Jesse's into books. Liam, you know, J.K. Rowling, I mean, what she did for kids reading books is fantastic. Big thank you to her for that. Less thanks for her attitude to trans people.

Park that. But Liam really loved graphic novels. So I got him to read as many Shakespeare places I could find as graphic novels because they're all, the Shakespeare's correct. And it's in a form. And with the drawings, it gives you the context and everything that might be tricky if you're reading it cold.

So graphic novels, I love graphic novels. And then Daisy the youngest, she is doing, she's about to start her theology PhD. So she reads everything and she reads things that I can't even somewhat in sentences. So yeah, we're a bookie family. My husband is a novelist and I met him when he ran bookshops. So, yeah. Bailey's is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcasing 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, Baileys, is the perfect accompaniment to enjoy either over ice or over coffee. There are no better friendships than those formed around brilliant books. And since you're listening, we're guessing you love books as much as we do. The Women's Prize has created an exclusive community that gives you a bookish backstage pass offering surprises and freebies, plus unmissable reading recommendations and book chat from my founder friends, including me, Vic Hope. Search for Women's Prize friend to become a friend today. We cannot wait to meet you.

Well, let's move on to your second bookshelfy book, which is Green Darkness by Ania Seton, a 1972 novel that spent six months on the bestseller list. This novel centers around reincarnation and the possibility of fixing past tragedies by reliving them. So in Tudor England, 13-year-old Celia de Boen falls head over heels in love with a young Catholic priest, Stephen Marston. Despite his best efforts, they find themselves in a deeply passionate relationship where love actually surpasses Celia's death. Fast forward to the 1960s, and Celia, in another life,

is the young and rich wife of Richard Marsden and finds her marriage threatened by the past. Tell us about this book. Why did it resonate with you? So I read this, I think I just finished doing my O-levels. So that's 1978. And as a reward, this is hilarious. This is what kind of is a reward then. We went on a walking holiday in the Lake District.

And we stayed in a youth hostel, all my cohort of fellow O-levelers who were able to come on the trip. Yeah, it was a fantastic holiday, quite scary, big high mountains, scree, somebody fell down and hurt an arm and all sorts of adventures. And then I would come back to my room and when everybody else was out shouting the odds, I was in this youth hostel, in the middle of the Lake District. So there were trees everywhere around us. And I was reading green darkness. That's where I read it. I read it on my bunk bed, voraciously, couldn't wait to get back to my bed. A, it's historical fiction, which I love.

And B, I love time travel stories. The house on the Strand, I love that, I love anything. There used to be a kids program called Time Slip in the 70s, where two kids, they find a gap in time, and then they're in 1942, and it's during the war, and they're still in their school uniform, and then if they have to get back to the present day, they have to find where the gap in the barbed wire fences

that takes them into the 1970s. So I love anything that's about time travel because I think that I think time, I think of time as a sort of, as a vertical thing. So we're always in lots of different times at the same time. So, you know, I'm talking to you here, a woman in her late 50s in my garden,

but in my head I'm also four and all the memories that you hold that you can as far back, you know, you are always in all those different time periods and you'll have certain people who you've known for a big chunk of your life who never see you as the person who meets you for the first time sees you. They always see you in that time. So my best friend will see me as a 14-year-old punk, you know, still.

So why I love this book is because it's one of those, the marriage starts to get wobbly in the present day and they have to go back. When they go back in time, literally Celia goes back in time and she's an English noble woman, so of French heritage. And what happens to her in the past fixes her marriage in the present. You do live a life forwards in a linear manner,

but you don't remember it backwards. When we look back on, I was thinking about a friend last night who I lost and thinking about how my memories of him will come in waves. And I'll remember different points in his life that they'll be important to me, depending on what I need from them, you know? Yeah.

And I've actually, I've seen in interviews with you that you said that fame and being remembered doesn't interest you in that way. Don't care. What is important to you? My brother, my brother talks about, my brother's a musician and we're both hippies from the Cotswolds, really. He lives in L.A. and he talks about the miracle of being alive. Like it's literally there are, there are, I don't know, hundreds, millions, who knows how many burning balls of gas in the solar system. And the miraculous thing that on this particular burning ball of gas, chemicals came together in such a way that we're, you know, you and I can be sitting here talking about literature. And I can be sitting in a sun-filled garden and we can be seeing each other on this equipment.

I mean, life is a miracle. Yes. Life is a miracle every day. And I think I'm, what I'm interested in doing with my life and any of my work is to open, is to make us pause for a minute and see the miracle of each other and the miracle of the world that we live in and the miracle of every moment. And anything that is anti the glory of that miracle, I will work against. So that means I'll work against climate change. I'll work against poverty. I will work against racism.

sexism, transphobia, homophobia, disabling attitudes, or all kinds of, anything that gets in the way of us being in the joy of the miracle of our lives and the pigeons are good. I love that, as you said that, those birds just look at the eye to. And that's the other thing. In lockdown, I mean, we spent so much time, either if you had the fortune to have a garden or a balcony or an outside space, of being in it or walking in parks when we were able.

Nature is a miraculous encourager because whatever's happening, it just keeps coming. Yeah. You know, every war-torn zone that you can imagine, there will, you'll find, there'll be a weed, there'll be a twigs, there'll be a something will come because nature, we're built to keep going and that's the great encouragement for us all. And to go and to be in abundance and in glory. And I just feel that's what we should all have. And I think it's very fitting as well that you described reading green darkness while surrounded by nature, by that abundance and feeling so feverish as you rush through the pages to get to the end.

I love that image. And I think so many of us can relate because it's important that we feel that. Well, let's move on to your third book, Shelby book, and it is a question of power by Bessie Heads, written while the author was under severe mental strain after recovering from a psychotic breakdown. This book follows the character of Elizabeth. Forced to flee South Africa, her oppressive home country and her husband as well, Elizabeth finds herself in rural Botswana with her son. Here she is isolated by the villagers because she is urban and light-skinned. Not only is she's socially isolated, but she's also intellectually deprived.

The only person she can talk to is Tom. Elizabeth is plagued by economic hardships and mental health, but love for her son and Tom provides the solace she needs to survive. Now, Elizabeth is a character born from a white mother of high standing and a black father. And so she's welcomed in near the South Africa for her dark skin nor Botswana where her skin was not dark enough. Adra, you have a white mother, a black father, so English and Ghanaian. Did you ever experience this liminal sense of unbelling? There's a book actually called The Unbelonging by Joan Riley, who is a British black,

writer. I think it came out in 82. And actually, it's not on my list. It could have easily been on my list. But the women's press published it. That book, I wept my face off because on every page, I was like, because I think there's a thing if you grew up particularly in the period I grew up in, in the 60s, in rural England, I mean, I bless my. dad for moving us out there in one regard because I just love nature, just love nature. And I can milk cows by hand. I can, you wish to go black, blackberry picking and scrumping and for apples and damson and slows and, you know, you just see, you know how to suck the nectar out of the end of a of a stinging nettle flower. And you know when the corn is ripe enough

for you to nick some ears of corn and just nibble them. as you're walking through it. That was my childhood. It's like, side with Rosie, it was like a documentary, apart from the African bit. So I think that sense of unbelonging was sort of nailed in pretty early on.

The sense of, and I think you can talk to lots of children who have a parent from somewhere else who have been raised here and go to somewhere else and you're the English kid. So Bruni in my case, meaning sort of foreigner or white person. That's me in Ghana.

I think it's Oyenbo in Europe. There's a thing. And I don't think it's just about, it's not a racial thing either. I think it's because I know Echo Eschen talks about also being called Brunei when he's in Ghana. And he's as black as my father, which is very black. It's about a state of mind. it's a cultural sense of where you have absorbed your references and all that sorts of stuff. So I think that sense of unbelonging is quite a powerful thing.

And it's not something that you experience once. You experience it for your entire life. I remember I had some friends when I was a kid. There was another family who lived next door to us when I was born. I was born in Bristol. And Jan Sahandy was Pakistani and Mary Sahandy was white. She'd grown up in India. I think her family were part of the whole British Empire over there.

And they had two kids Dowd and Sarah Sahandi. And we were all kids together. And we used to talk about having the island where the mixed kids, mixed race kids could go and live where we wouldn't have to fit in with anybody, but accept each other. and we'd be accepted. So that was a, I was very conscious that from an early age.

And even, even now, I go to Ghana every year now, but I don't speak Fenty. And that's on me. I need to, I speak French and German. Why can't I speak Fanti?

So that's on me to learn. But I do know, I'll go to Ghana and everybody will be chatting, and it's lovely and lovely. And then somebody will say something in Fanti and somebody else will laugh, and then they look at me and they'll go, English, sorry.

And then look it back. And I'm like, I'm just so humiliated. So, So yeah, it's on my list. Every year it's on my list. This is the year I have to learn for Fanti. I remember developing a sense of, okay, I belong nowhere, but maybe I also belong everywhere as a result, as a result of that. Honestly, that's that's so the way to go. There is something brilliant in all the different traditions that we can draw on. Like I, my mum's family, they were farmers and

farm labourers for centuries in Yorkshire. We've got sheep cups going back to the 1600s. And then my grandfather ran away to sea because he didn't want to be a farm labourer. And he became a merchant seaman and he worked for Cunard. And so my mum grew up in Liverpool. So I love all the folk traditions, working class folk traditions, rural and industrial. So I love folk music. And folk music is like across the world.

It's, you know, I just love all those stories. again, it's swinging the lens. All those stories that only get told orally that because they're not codified, we think don't exist. So Bessie Head, I think I resonated with her sadness. He was a sad woman. And Elizabeth, the character is called Elizabeth, and she's Bessie.

It's not a big stretch, is it? And Bessie Head, her mother was posh, was a wealthy Afrikaner. who had an affair with a black man who was never identified. And so when Bessie was born, she was dumped by her family. And she was given to a coloured couple to foster. And then she went into care. She graduated amazingly.

She was a primary school teacher. And then she was the only woman writer. She moved to Cape Town. She was the only woman writer on the Golden City Post, which was their newspaper. And she worked for the Pan-African Congress. And she got arrested for her political associations. And she married another journalists, a man called Harold Head. And then she gave birth to their kid.

And then she ended up moving to Botswana at a certain point. and having lots of mental health problems which are completely understandable from her childhood and her raising. And she's sort of, they become echoed in her, you know, they become echoed in her novels. And so she, but in this novel, you know, she's having dreams.

She dream, she's being tormented by men in her dreams. And she's being isolated by the village in her day, in her waking hours. She's trying to raise the kid. She's very poor. She has a problem with drink and she meets Tom. And it's not a happy book. No, it's not.

But they don't have to be. And there's no happy resolution in it either. And I really like that because I feel like you've just, you've just gone, this is what someone's life is like. But for me, what I think what the heart I take from it is, Bessie Heard is echoing a story that is her story in a fiction form. But wow, however distressing she is in her heart and in her mind and in her spirit, she keeps writing. You know, she works.

And telling her own story. And telling that story and making sure that story is present. Because who thinks of mixed race women born in the 1930s in South Africa, becoming the first female journalist on a, you know, on a major newspaper and continuing to write? I mean, she died at 48 of hepatitis, so a short life. But she left books that little mixed race girls like me could come to. Yeah. And seeing yourself on the pages of a book is such a potent thing that validates, gives you confidence and helps you to tell your story because you know that that story is worth being told. Have you found Bisciteers yet? Biscateears are the original hand-eised biscuit gifting company offering beautiful biscuit collections for any occasion.

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Jean Reese. This is a brutal portrait of a woman struggling to survive from the author of of Wides Saragasy. After the death of her baby and the breakdown of her marriage, Julia Martin lives in a drab hotel room in 1930s Paris, financed by her latest love interest, Mr. McKenzie, who has just left her. When he stopped financing her life, Julia decides to go back to England and her resentful sister Nora. Exhausted by broken love affairs and addled by drink, Julia is tragically unable to find what she really wants love. Now, Julia is a woman who has never been in control of her own destiny. She relies solely on others to survive. Lady Danbury, on the other hand, is an independently wealthy woman with power. Adjoa, how important

is it that we recognize female power, especially black female power, in a TV series set in a time where women were commonly seen as weak. Well, I think, you know, all these book choices. And so, you know, Gene Reese had this mad love affair with Ford Maddox Ford, who's the great British novelist, parade, Howard's End. They made a fantastic series of parade with Benedict Cumberbatch for years ago. He's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant novelist. I love his stuff.

And he had this fabulous affair with Gene Reese. And in fact, he was the one who told her to, to change her name because her real name is Ella Gwendolyn Reese Williams. And her grandmother was Creole. I think these people that come from somewhere else, Lady Danbury has an African family and she's sent to the UK to marry well over here. as, you know, and aristocratic Africans did this during colonising times. So I think it's about trying to carve a space for yourself in a new environment

and what acuity you can bring to do that. And Lady Dambray is smart and she's brought all her powers of strategy, navigating a new place and making yourself indispensable in that new place to survive and thrive and be independent. And it's sort of the, I suppose it's like the other side of the character that Jean Reese depicts in this novel, a bit like Jean Reese herself. But I think what Lady Danbury would share with my delight in this book is that sort of, you know, the perno drinking Reeve Ghosh set, tragic, but then with great big flares of fabulousness. And then back in, you know, it's a sort of glamorous penury. So Lady Danbury would certainly

She would love that She'd love the glamorous She wouldn't be so good on the penury So yeah, I'm bringing a lot of me to Lady Danbury I'm glad when I see black children Send me photographs, girls and boys Of dressing up as Lady Danbury And feeling like they can be part of that story

And for Lady Danbury to be part of a story That has had suffering But also has determination and, you know, what have you got about you? What have you got about you that can make you work out how to exist successfully in any given tricky situation? Come on now, harness it. It's that sort of, we can all sit and weep. Okay, you can weep.

Okay, and now we have to move on. Now I move. That forward progression I like about Lady Danbury. And I guess, Gene Reese, a bit like Bessie Head, that forward progression was tricky. for her in her own life, but she wrote and she wrote and she wrote and her sentences are superb. So, yeah. Talking of getting out of it and moving forward, whether that's through writing or however we lift ourselves up, have there ever been times in your life when you felt down? We felt defeated like Julia in after leaving Mr. McKenzie. And how did you overcome it? I think I feel like that all the time, don't we?

I think, well, we can. No, I do. I feel it on a daily basis. And I think, I think lots of us do. And, you know, you have your public facing self and you have your private facing self. And I've been a bereavement counsellor. I've worked as a therapist. I've had three kids. I've got a grandchild. In my head, I'm still 14 and I've just seen the clash. I can fight anyone.

I'm a good fighter. And I can also pray and refresh. and glory at a sunrise. And I think you just have to take yourself in the round and give yourself permission to be where you be. You know, there's no point going, I'm going to be fine. It's going to be fine. Because somewhere the unfineness is bubbling away. You need to unpack it and go, this is not fine. I feel, okay, it's not fine. So now what are you going to do with that? The sun rises and the sunsets and you just with forward motion creatures. And I've got that sense of you go forward. I've got that from my mother and my grandmothers and my father coming to this

country, nod of his own volition and then having to make a life for himself here. And I see it in every refugee boat that lands on the coast. And I see it in every person who's trying to survive in bombed out rubble and, you know, and I think about those young women and those girls and those older women in Afghanistan today. We let them down so badly. But, you know, the drive to move forward is always, is always there. And I want to celebrate that in my work, but I also want to go, and there's also a space to fall apart. It's like we keep saying we can celebrate the rhythm, but we also acknowledge the blues. And it's those moments of darkness that sometimes make the glimmers of light, all the brighter. Well, let's move on to your fifth and final book this week,

which is beloved by Tony Morrison. They've all been like comedies, haven't they? I mean, but beautiful at the same time. And that's the thing. That's the thing you can be. You can be so, so heavy and so, so beautiful. This book won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so.

It's based on the life of slave, Margaret Garner, who managed to escape from a plantation in America with their family. Years later, however, they were quite the police, and their former owner in a desperate attempt to save her daughter from going back into slavery, Margaret killed her. Tony Morrison captures Margaret's story in the character set, who is haunted by the violent and traumatic memories of her life as a slave. Why did you choose this book? This is probably my favourite book of all time.

I'd read everything Tony Morrison had written, you know, Sula and the bluest eye. You know, she's just an amazing, amazing thinker. And I love this book because the sentences are excellent. It took me a couple of goes to start it. And then once I started, I couldn't stop it. And now I can, I read it. I reread it regularly, but I only read it on holiday because it makes me so hard. So sad, I find it hard to function.

You need that space. Yeah. I love baby Sugs. Baby Sugs Holy, when she, there's a passage in the book where she talks about going to a clearing on a Sunday morning. And baby Sugs goes to the clearing. And baby Suggs is Seth's mother. So the grandmother of beloved. And she goes to the clearing on a Sunday morning.

And out of the woods, clearing in a woods. Woods. Woods is my jam. So I'm also a patron for an organisation called Tree Aid now, who are replanting trees in the Sahel in Africa to try and stop the desertification moving further south. And it was set up by foresters in Bristol who were looking at the way they could protect riverbanks and things like that. And I was born in Bristol, so it felt like a good charity. But trees are definitely my jam. And so baby Suggs has this clearing in the forest. And black people suddenly appear in the come from the trees.

They all gather in the clearing. And then she preaches to them. And she says, you know, love your skin, love your hands, love your kidneys and your liver and love your neck because they don't love your neck. to hang your neck, you know, love your heart because they want to break your, it's just this most, in the middle of all this sadness, this is, it's one of the most breathtaking, I wish I'd got it with me and I'd read you a passage, but it's one of the most breathtaking passages

in any book I've read because it says there's a whole history of sorrow and survival and ingenuity and making beauty in hard places. She brings all that knowledge and all that history and she shares it with everybody. And then they dance and they dance for the joy of being alive for the miracle of still being there, still being able to dance. And they dance in defiance of their circumstances

and the history that's been allotted to them. And they dance for hope and for a future. And that book is fully, of the most terrible, terrible descriptions of suffering and slavery for a woman to kill the creature, the child, who she is built by nature to help survive. That's, you know, if you give birth, nature intends for you to keep that species going. That's your gig. To have experienced something so awful that out of your profound sense of love for your child, you would rather they were dead than live in the world that they would be taken back into in slavery,

tells you something about the profound sorrow and horror of that book. So a book that contains all that and contains, you know, baby sugs and a haunted ghost, a haunting ghost who is full of all that grief and that sorrow and that rage. It's a tremendous piece of work. So desperate and so. viscerally evocative. It is an absolute masterpiece. I just want to finish with one question actually because Margaret and Seth both have hopes for better futures, better lives for their children. You have three children. What are your hopes for them? What are your hopes for their futures?

What do their futures look like in this world? I think my hopes for my kids and my hopes for anybody's kids and for you and for me. I think that I do believe that we come into this world, these unique, created souls and nobody has the experiences you have. And, you know, whether we want to set our stall as a person of colour or set our stall as a woman, or set our stall around neurodivergence or whatever we want to set our stall in, nobody is like us. And I want to see a world where you can go, okay, if I have to identify you,

I can say you are of combined heritage of blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, or you have this physical disability, or you have this neurodivergence or this issue. I don't care about any of that. I'm interested in the human being. And I think we have to push all those categories because we are trying to get equality for everybody. And so sometimes that means, you know what? I'm going to have to bang this drum because that doorway is not wide enough to get a wheelchair in or, you know, whatever it may be.

We need to have a space in the day now because somebody who has that particular neurodivergence needs a break. It's got nothing to do with their willingness or their smartness or their personality. They just need to break. So we have to highlight that stuff. But I want to highlight that stuff. So in the end, we just have it all available and people can just be people. So what I want for my children is with the unique giftings that they have, that they get to thrive in the world. I go to work every day happy.

I may moan. You know, we all may moan. But I go to work happy because I get to dress up and tell stories. And I've been doing that since I was tiny. That's my gifting. Whether I'm directing or producing or writing or acting, storytelling is my gifting. Somebody else may have a, you know, they may be a brilliant, I don't know, pottery maker, but they were born into a family of bankers.

No, you should be doing pottery, you know, or somebody may have been born somewhere where everybody works in the car factory. But actually, they would be brilliant on the harpsichord. That's, I want a world where everybody gets to be in their gifting. Celebrating that uniqueness, It sort of brings us back in a way to this idea of unbelling, belonging, belonging nowhere, but essentially belonging everywhere. And I always say to every little black girl that I talk to,

because as a black woman you feel a responsibility to make it clear that you can be not just anything, but also everything. Yes, she can be everything. Asha, if you had to choose just one book, just finally, from your list, as a favourite. I feel like I know the answer, but what would it be? It's got to be beloved for the sadness and the joy and the resilience and the bravura writing and actually a book that just says, Hope. Well, on that note, I cannot thank you enough. This has been beautiful, so I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you, Adjua. Absolutely pleasure. Thanks, Vic.

I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Press for Fiction podcast. Please rate and review this podcast. It's the easiest way to help spread the word about the female talent you've heard about today. The Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.