Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep8: Shortlist 2022: The Authors

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Vick Hope speaks to the six brilliant authors who have been shortlisted for the 2022 Prize - Elif Shafak, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Louise Erdrich, Maggie Shipstead, Meg Mason and Ruth Ozeki. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on June 15th.    The 2022 shortlist:  The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini The Sentence by Louise Erdrich Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki   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, kicking off with guest Gabby Logan. 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.

Ladies and gentlemen. Pinocchio, now streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. Sounds like my kind of place. Director Robert Zemeckis delivers a dream come true for the whole family. I want to be real. And Tom Hanks shines as Geppetto. It's going to be quite an adventure. Let nothing stop you.

Jenny! From experiencing the next Disney classic. And to be real is up to you. It's in your heart. Disney's Pinocchio, only on Disney Plus. Now streaming. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 5 of the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. You've joined me for a very special bonus episode to celebrate this year's Women's Prize for Fiction shortlisted authors. Welcome to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. In this episode, we'll be hearing from the six incredible authors who have been shortlisted for this year's prize. Lisa Alan Angostini, Louise Erdrich, Meg Mason, Ruth Ozeki, Aleve Shafak and Maggie Shipstead.

The 2022 winner will be announced on Wednesday the 15th of June. We begin with Aleph Shafak's beautiful novel, The Island of Missing Trees, tracing the aftershocks of. Civil War on a British Cypriot family. Here's an extract from the book read by E.R. and Doctor Who actor Alex Kingston. I guess now is the time I need to tell you something important about myself. I am not what you think I am. A young, delicate fig tree planted in a garden somewhere in North London. I am that and much more. Or perhaps I should say in one life I have lived several.

which is another way of saying, I am old. I was born and raised in Nicosia once upon a time. Those who knew me back then couldn't help breaking into a smile, a tender glint in their eyes. I was treasured and loved to such a degree that they had named a whole tavern after me. And what a tavern that was,

the best for many miles. The brass sign over the entrance read, The Happy Fig. It was inside this celebrated eating house and watering hole, crowded, rowdy, joyous and hospitable, that I spread my roots and grew up through a cavity in the roof that was specifically opened for me. Every visitor to Cyprus wanted to dine here

and taste its famous stuffed corsette flowers, followed by chicken souvlaki, cooked over open, air charcoal, if they were so lucky as to find a table. This is a story that focuses on war, partition, division, but also conflicting memories, clashing memories. I've been wanting to write about Cyprus for a very long time. But to be honest, I didn't know how to do that, because it's a complicated story.

It's a very difficult story to tell. This is a beautiful island with beautiful people north and south, and I feel emotionally attached to the island. But at the same time, it is a difficult story to tell because, as you know, as we're speaking, there's a border that cuts the island into two parts, and this frontier literally separates Christians from Muslims and Greek Cypriots from Turkish Cypriots. So it's drawn along both religious and ethnic lines. And I think it's also important to recognize that it's a place where the past is not a bygone affair. It's not over yet. I think there are lots of wounds and the wounds are still bleeding.

You know, they're unhealed and there are traumas and there are silences. So I've been struggling with this story for a very long time. How do you, as a writer, approach such a complicated story without yourself falling into the trap of nationalists? without yourself falling into the trap of tribalism. I was not able to find an angle until I found the fig tree, or the fig tree found me. So it might sound strange, but I feel very grateful to this fig tree

because it gave me a different angle, and only then I found a bit more courage to start telling the story. There was a crazy amount of research that went into this book. also every seemingly small thing I had to you know pay attention to seemingly minute details and do a lot of research because I wanted to honour of course human suffering but also the suffering of animals, of plants, trees,

the disappearance of trees. So for me the entire ecosystem was very important. This is a book that, that has that kind of sensitivity. But as a result of which I had to do research about mosquitoes, about butterflies, about fruit bats, you know, trees and plants, in addition to studying history and conflict and political history. So that was quite interesting. I mean, it was a very eclectic reading list, an incredibly interdisciplinary work.

I love that. I enjoy doing interdisciplinary work. but it wasn't easy, you know. So I wanted to pay maximum attention to seemingly little details, as well as the major story and, of course, the major conflict. I paid a lot of attention to written culture, but also equally to oral culture, oral storytelling, things that are not necessarily found in books,

like legends and lullabies and myths and superstitions, you know. So all those details were also incredibly important for me. But if I may add this, in addition, I've been reading about trees and plants. I'm a tree hugger myself. I love trees. I believe we have a lot to learn from trees. So the research went on for many, many years. The writing process, of course, took relatively shorter compared to the research.

But I think I've been preparing myself for this book for. a very long time. Next, Lisa Alan Angostini, discussing her debut adult fiction novel, The Bread, the Devil Need, which follows its feisty and fiercely independent heroine, Alethea, who is struggling with an abusive relationship and striving to become the woman she wants to be. And here's none other than Bond actor and Moonlight Star Naomi Harris to read an extract of the book. It was dark outside the board walls of the house. The kitchen lamp flared with the sound of the...

of a match being struck and threw up shadows Alethea could see on the kitchen wall over the partition between the two rooms. There was Mammy, an enormous, slow-moving black blob. And there was Uncle Alan, with the radio voice, his shadow thin and spindly like a daddy long legs. Golden light flickered in swift, gleaming patterns in between the shadows whenever she heard liquid splash into the glasses. the ear curled next to Colin's compact body and watched the shadows dance closer and closer to each other until her eyelids grew too heavy to stay open anymore. The first draft of the novel was written in standard English and I was talking with a fellow writer, Trinidadian writer called Sharon Miller,

who's a fine writer and whose work I really admire. And she had read parts of the draft and she suggested that maybe what was wrong, because it wasn't quite jelling, she suggested maybe what was wrong was that I needed to make it first person, because it was originally written in third person. And when I put it in first person, I realized that the character of Alethea absolutely would not tell her story in standard English. She absolutely spoke Trinidad Creole as her first language. And so it therefore had to be written in Trinidad Creole and that's and that's what happened. Now, Trinidad Creole is primarily oral. I mean, we have a great corpus of writing that's written in

Trinidad Creole. So there is, you know, I'm not reinventing the wheel by any means, you know, but it is primarily an oral language, you know. It sounds like she's talking to a friend. and I think I'm really happy with the way it came out, you know. I'm a feminist, and I've been a feminist. I've identified as a feminist since I was a teenager. My character, Alethea Lopez, who is the main character of the bread the devil need, does not call herself a feminist. And in fact, in her attitudes, you will say that she's absolutely not a feminist

because she completely, you know, allows herself to be subjected to, man after man after man after man after man. And truth be told, I wanted to show that whatever facade a person presents, man or woman, we don't know what's necessarily going on with them when they're at home. We don't know what's behind the person they present in public. So she has a fairly good job.

she seems to be really in charge of her life. But when she goes home, it's absolutely not true. She is completely subjected, you know, to the whims of her boyfriend who beats her and who, you know, sexually abuses her and who emotionally abuses her. And the only way that she can get power is through, you know, having an affair with her boss. That's her own way of saying, well, you can control something. but I still ultimately have control over some things too. And really and truly what I wanted to show was that

a woman doesn't wake up one morning and find herself suddenly in an abusive relationship. There's a history, a personal history, a societal kind of conditioning that prefigures the moment of her ending up in an abusive relationship, that sets her up in a way to accept small things. You can't go out by yourself. You can't make decisions for yourself.

You ought not to really make choices about how your money is being spent. You know, it's like brick by brick by brick, by brick. And then suddenly there's a house. And then suddenly there's a mansion. And then suddenly there's a city. And yeah, so that's what I wanted to show that you don't know, looking at a woman, looking at anyone from the outside. What's really going on inside?

Pinocchio, now streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. Sounds like my kind of place. Director Robert Zemeckis delivers a dream come true for the whole family. I want to be real. And Tom Hanks shines as Geppetto. It's going to be quite an adventure. Let nothing stop you. Jimmy!

From experiencing the next Disney classic. And to be real is up to you. It's in your heart. Disney's Pinocchio only on Disney Plus, now streaming. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's Apply. It's 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 favorite book, Bailey's 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, Big Hope. Search for Women's Prize friend to become a friend today.

We cannot wait to meet you. You're listening to a special episode of the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, where we are speaking to this year's spectacular shortlisted authors. Next, we speak with Louise Erdrick, the author of The Sentence, a wickedly funny ghost story with a convict turned bookseller protagonist that asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. Here's an extract of the book read by Star of Westworld and The Stand, Irene Bedard. Five days after Flora died, she was still coming to the bookstore.

I'm not strictly rational. How could I be? I sell books. Even so, I found the truth of this hard to accept. Flora came in when the store was empty, always on my shift. She knew our slow hours. The first time this happened, I had just learned the sad news and was easily rattled. I heard her murmuring and then wrestling about on the other side of the tall bookshelves in fiction, her favorite section. In need of good sense, I picked up my phone to text Pollux, but what to say? I put down the phone to the deep breath and query the empty store.

I love to put words on a page. I write by hand, so I get to do that anywhere, anytime. I like being able to take on a persona. to explore just about anything you can imagine in a novel. It gives me the chance to research qualities in the world, be it qualities of different objects or the qualities of different people. It gives me the chance to put people in situations that bring out their best and their worst. I wish I could explain why Tuckie turned out the way she did and why I wrote in her voice, but I really can't because I was not expecting Tuckie to be the person she is in the book.

I knew she was funny and irreverent and that there was something going on with her. that was beyond my experience, but it turned out to be quite a bit beyond my experience. And so when I found out, I wrote the beginning of the book, and that practically wrote itself. You know, sometimes you hear a story taking place in your mind and you just think,

I really have to go with it. I don't really have a choice here, and that's what happened to me. My main piece of advice is it's a sort of negative advice. It seems at first, but it's the most important thing anyone ever said to me. It was nobody cares. It's up to you. Nobody's going to come knocking at your door and say, please, I need your writing or I need your art.

Give me your art. Nobody's going to hold their hands out. So it's only up to you and it's only you're the one. You can imagine that you're going to be somehow supported that might even be true for some time. But it's on you. You're the one. Nobody else is going to care about that work.

It's you. It's all on you. That was great advice. Next up, we catch up with Maggie Shipstead about her novel, Great Circle, An enthralling journey over oceans and continents following a troubled Hollywood starlet playing vanished pilot Marion Graves

a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the fearless female aviators' life. Here's an extract of the book read by Sherlock actor Louise Brilly. He forgot to answer. Or maybe I'd only asked inside my head. And for some unmeasurable period of time we sat there looking at the view, thinking about whatever.

And then he was like, what is this place? It's the angels, I told him. I know, he said, but what is it? I could hear wind chimes coming from a neighbour's house, so I was like, it's wind chimes. What else? A helicopter went blinking by.

It's helicopters. What else? It's wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it's muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash truck. picking up everyone's bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It's coyotes, yipping like delinquents who've just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox. And it's mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. Great Circle is the story of Marion Graves, who's a fictional female pilot,

who disappeared while trying to fly around the world north-south over the polls in 1950s. And it's also the story of Hadley Baxter, who's a modern movie star who's playing Marion in a movie about her life and sort of gets drawn into this question of who Marion really was and what happened to her. The book had many sources of inspiration, especially because it took several years to write even the first draft. So I was always sort of pulling from different pieces of research, different experiences. but the very first idea for it came from a statue I saw at the Auckland International Airport of a pilot named Gene Baton, who was the first person to fly solo from England to New Zealand in 1936. And at the time, I was just looking for my next novel idea, and I just thought, oh, I'll write a book

about a female pilot, how simple problem solved, and just started from there, which was incredible. inaccurate. The research for Great Circle was never ending, much of which was my own fault. I can't really plan a novel in advance. I just sort of have to start. So I was starting just from this idea of this vanished pilot. So it's kind of to my own surprise that when I sat down, I thought, well, maybe I'll start this in a shipyard in Glasgow in 1909 with the launch of an ocean liner. And so then I have to stop everything, you know, order used books off the internet, start digging around, trying to figure out how do you launch an ocean liner? And then for the next major plot line, how does an ocean liner sink?

And then some of the most difficult questions to answer as I was writing were sort of the simplest ones. Like when would a house in Missoula, Montana, have had indoor plumbing or have had electricity? And it's not something you could just Google. You sort of have to look for context clues. And as I researched, I often came across just sort of historical tidbits or ideas that inspired me in one way or another. And so then I would just put into the book and they'd change the course of the book. Like the idea that in the U.S. at least, all the different armed services had official artists during the Second World War,

whose task was to sort of try to capture, as they put it in their official assignment, the spirit or essence of war with paints or by drawing. And so then this became a plotline in the book for Marion's twin brother, Jamie. And so that sort of thing, it always felt a little bit like two steps forward, one step back, just always having to dig and make sure the book was accurate and also sort of follow all the tangents that I came across. When I started writing, I thought it would only be about Marion Graves, the pilot. And so I think I was about a month into working on the first draft. when one day

sat down and unexpectedly wrote a section in the voice of this female movie star in, I think, in 2014. And on the surface,

the two things had nothing to do with each other. Hadley, I wrote a scene where Hadley, the movie star, is leaving a nightclub

and sort of publicly cheating on her boyfriend. But for some reason, this just felt like the missing piece to me, and I knew I wanted to incorporate her into the novel.

So I wrote the two sections or the two sort of through lines of the book, Marion and Hadley, simultaneously, and kind of in conversation with each other as I went. I think Hadley's underwent a lot more serious revision and took a few more attempts than Marians did as I wrote. But to me, Hadley came to seem like this sort of indispensable lens on Marion, because the reader sees Marion's life very close.

understands its details and Hadley's trying to reconstruct this life from 70 years later. And so it's a way to show just how much is lost of a life when someone dies and how much we can't really know about other people, even the ones we might see every day. I think the process of writing a book is always different, different for different people, different for individual authors. But for me, I had written my first novel, I mean, I wrote the first draft in eight months. I did some revision. and I published it.

I wrote my second novel, astonished me from starting it to selling it to my publisher in five months. And so I had this sense of myself as like, I just sort of tossed these off. You know, you just write a book. It's no big deal. And so this was a bit of a rude awakening at just the amount of effort and thought and wrangling and sort of blood, sweat and tears that went into it. Have you found Biscateers yet? Biscateers are the original hand-eised biscuit gifting company.

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And Bisciteers are offering our lovely listeners 15% off your first order with the code Love Fiction. So for the very best present ideas, head to Biscateers.com now. Next, Meg Mason about her unforgettable novel, Sorrow and Bliss. The book is a very witty yet empathetic look at how long-term mental illness impact a middle-aged woman and her family. Here's an extract of the book read by none other than the star of The Crown and sex education, Gillian Anderson.

As we were driving out of London following our removal truck, Patrick asked me if I would consider making friends in Oxford even if I didn't want to when I was only doing it for him he didn't mind he just didn't want me to start hating it too soon he said at least until we've unloaded the car I was in the passenger seat looking for pictures of drunk Kate Moss on my phone to send Ingrid

because at the time we were communicating primarily by that means she was four weeks pregnant not intentionally and she said seeing pap shots of Kate Moss falling out of Annabelle's with her eyes a bit shut was the only way she was getting through the day at this point. I told Patrick I would, although I didn't know how. Maybe not a book club, obviously, but like a book club, he said. You don't have to get a job straight away either if I said there weren't any jobs anyway. I'd already looked. Well, in that case, it makes sense to focus on the friends thing and maybe you could think about doing something

else workwise if you wanted to or, I don't know, do a Masters. In what? In something. I screenshotted a picture of Kate Moss in a fur coat, ashing a cigarette into a hotel topiary and said, I'm thinking about retraining as a prostitute. In the middle of overtaking a van, Patrick shot me a look. Okay, first, that term isn't used anymore. Second, you know this house is in a cul-de-sac. There won't be the foot traffic. I went back to my phone. Sor and Bliss began as a love story

about a couple called Martha and Patrick, and we meet Martha on her 40th birthday, and after a long and occasionally happy, occasionally unhappy marriage, Patrick leaves her the next day. And from there, we track back to the first time they ever met when Martha was 17, Patrick was 14, he fell in love with her immediately

and sort of after five or ten years of friendship evolving they finally got together but what occurred in the meantime is that in Martha's words a little bomb went off in her brain leaving her with a mental illness that was never diagnosed at the time and continued not to be through this 20 years that we see them until right before her birthday she finally gets the diagnosis that she's seeking so the question of the novel then becomes

this mystery that's now been solved and this force that's been at the centre of her existence that she would say has informed all of her decisions, her relationships, her career. Now that she has that piece of information, is it too late to undo the damage that it's done and get the things that she's always wanted? My absolute goal for the novel was to make sure that Martha the protagonist was a whole and fully formed woman that we could see in every single facet of her life, and who felt so truly authentic that we would come away from the book thinking that she is really someone that we knew a friend or a sister or a cousin. And because at the center of her story

is this mental illness, it was so important to me to build her as a character and to show everything that she is before bringing the illness into it because I really felt as, you know, as a reader myself and as a writer and as a human being that as soon as we knew what this illness was, that would be all of what she was. And it's an unfortunate thing, I think, in human nature that we want to categorize and we want to label. And of course, there are immense benefits to having a diagnosis into label,

but I think that it was really important to show her in all of those other ways and then to reveal this illness that she had. And even in doing that, because I still wanted her to remain a whole person, I never gave the name of the diagnosis. So even though in a way, it's, you know, it's sort of everything that,

book's been working towards when the diagnosis is revealed it's only ever described with two dashes. So Martha finds out what it is but we never do. And I think although that, you know, has been in some ways controversial amongst a particular contingent of readers, it couldn't have been any other way. If I had named her condition, she would forever and always be that condition from the very first line of the blurb. So I, that was my intention for her and that's what I really hope that I've managed to do. To capture, I think, and pathos in the same novel, or darkness and light in the same novel, is not actually as challenging as it would sound of someone set you the task of doing it. I think for me,

it came about because I wrote a whole first manuscript that was vaguely associated with this novel. It wasn't the same story with all of the same characters, but because I got lost with it and the harder I tried to save it, the more sort of dark and literary I tried to become in order to seem clever and to seem serious and, you know, with this view that I would be taken seriously if I wrote a really dark novel. And all of that actually just meant that I tried for a whole year to keep jokes out of it, as it were, or to keep humour out of it, thinking that humour has less value, it's not as important. But, I mean, human life, how would any of us survive? It's such, you know, it's a coping mechanism that we all employ. Humour is a way that we connect with people. It's how we feel

safe, it's how we get through the day. And so to have told this story, which really is harrowing in parts and not to let Martha have her voice and have her comic relationship with her very funny sister, Ingrid, you know, all of that would be to strip her down in a way that would not even make her seem realistic to us. I mean, do any of us have friends that we wouldn't say are funny or, you know, it just wouldn't have seemed right. So I think I just let it be more true. And in that way, the humor sort of came out. And in the very blackest moments, she, will often as the protagonist sort of pivot and say something slightly absurd or conceptual that I think we would all say in a situation like that in order to kind of make ourselves

feel safe we often make a joke and that's what Martha does. So often when you write a novel a lot of the things that you have done you didn't realize you did them until after the novel is published and someone tells you and in the case of Sorom-Bliss it was that I wrote what some people have seen as a love story between the two sisters as well as between Martha and Patrick. So Ingrid is a very important character but I don't think I set out to explore it perhaps with the depth that it ended up having. I think I wanted to show that incredibly tight and almost unbreakable bond and to make them almost two sides of a coin as well to show that Ingrid is just Martha but she didn't get ill. So they have very much the same life and Martha can

look at her sister's life and say that's the life I would have had if I'm I didn't get ill, so it provides that contrast as well. Finally, Ruth Ezeki discusses her spellbinding novel, the book of Form and Emptiness, which follows 14-year-old Benny O's life after the tragic death of his father and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. Here's an extract from the novel, read by Harry Potter star Jason Isaacs. Has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings to? As you listen to this romantic tale of two ill-fated lovers,

do you ever stop to wonder about what it feels like for us? Because in truth, if skin marks the border where an eye ends and a you begins, then in these moments of impassioned boundary crossing called love, we envy you. It's that simple. We envy you your bodies. How could we not? Books have bodies too, but

ours lack the organs needed to experience the world. The skin that covers our boards and encloses our words is different from yours. Our skin, whether made from paper or parchment or cloth, or these days some combination of plastic glass and metal, fulfills a similar function of marking our perimeters, but even the most haptic and capacitive of our skins cannot experience pleasure the way yours can. So the Book of Form and Emptiness is

the story of a young boy named Benny O, who when he's 12 years old, his father dies in a really tragic and also kind of stupid way. And Benny is very traumatized by this. And after his father's death, he hears his father's voice calling to him. And, you know, at first this is confusing to him. But then his father's voice kind of fades away. But then it's replaced by the voices of objects in his house. And he hears them speaking. And he doesn't quite understand what they're saying, but he sort of understands the feeling tone of the objects who are speaking to him.

And this is a problem because his mother, Annabel, is a bit of a hoarder. and she's working from home like we all are these days. And so her house has really become quite full of things. And it's a very, you know, it's a very cacophonous place. It's a very noisy place, which is disturbing to Benny. And eventually the voices sort of follow him out of the house and follow him to school, and he gets into trouble. And he eventually seeks refuge in a public library where, of course,

libraries are filled with objects, but they're, you know, the objects, they speak to us, but, you know, they know to speak quietly in their library voices. So he finds us to be a very soothing place. And he meets a cast of characters in the library who end up supporting him and helping him. In particular, he meets a very special talking object. He meets a book, and it's not just any book, it's his book. And he starts having a conversation with the book. And so, in essence, the book of form and emptiness is narrated by the book itself, sort of speaking itself into being.

And so it's really about the relationship between a boy and a book. The idea for the book came to me. Really, it was an image of a young boy walking down a crowded, cluttered corridor. and stepping on a bag of Christmas ornaments and hearing the ornament, the orb cry out to him. And I'm not exactly sure where that idea came from, you know, where that image comes from. It's always hard to pinpoint, you know, the starting point of a book. Usually it's a bunch of different elements that come together and start to constellate. And then from that, you know, that moving constellation, the idea or the character, you know, sort of grows out of that.

And so I think in this case, too, I'd been thinking about a Zen teaching story. It's called a koan. And one of the questions in the koan was, do insentient beings speak the Dharma? Do insentient beings, can they be our teachers? Can they tell us about the nature of existence? And so this is a, you know, in Zen practice, you know, you ponder these questions, right? And so this idea, you know, this question can insentient beings can trees and grasses and, you know, and pebbles and, you know, I don't know, water bottles and Christmas ornaments, you know, can,

Can they teach us something about the way we live? This was a question that was very active for me. It was so interesting trying to decide which objects to include in the book. I could have chosen anything. I mean, the world is filled with objects. And so I made a rule for myself. And the rule was that if anybody gave me something, right, or told me about something that was interesting, I would put that object in the book and see what

happened. And so a friend of mine went on a vacation and brought back a little snow globe with a sea turtle inside because she knew that I liked sea turtles. And so I gave the little snow globe to the mother, Annabel, in the book. And before I knew it, she was on eBay collecting snow globes because she's got this, you know, kind of hoarding problem. And the snow globe really spoke to her. And it became, the snow globe really became a kind of symbol for the relationship between Benny and his mother. and Benny and the outside world.

And so, you know, the choice of the objects and the way that the objects spoke, I really wanted to sort of leave that to serendipity. I wanted to kind of introduce a bit of randomness into the process of writing because that way I'm always surprised, right? I don't have to really make these decisions. The decisions are made by the conditions, you know, around me, right? And so it's a fun way to write. It's not a very efficient way to write.

It ends up taking a lot longer to do it this way. But I find it a lot more interesting and a lot more fun. Many thanks to all the shortlisted authors for taking time out to speak to us about their brilliant books. The winner of the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction will be announced on the evening of Wednesday, the 15th of June. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline. media. Please head over to our website to find out more about the shortlisted authors, get exclusive video and audio content, and check us out at Women's Prize on Instagram and Twitter to

join in the conversation. Please click, subscribe, and don't forget to write and review this podcast. It really helps spread the word about the female talent you've heard about today. So much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Star Wars Andor, streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. Cassian Ander, Empire is choking us. I need all the heroes I can get. From the creators of Rogue One

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