Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep13: Bookshelfie: Barbara Kingsolver

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Barbara Kingsolver, winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction discusses her winning novel, Demon Copperhead and also shares the books that have inspired her impressive career. Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, poet, and activist. She has published over a dozen critically acclaimed books, including the bestselling novels The Poisonwood Bible,The Lacuna, and Flight Behavior, and is the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice - first in 2010 for The Lacuna and the 2023 Prize was awarded for Demon Copperhead, a reimagining of Dickens' David Copperfield set in poverty-stricken Virginia at the height of the opioid crisis.  She has received numerous other literary awards over the course of her career, including the National Humanities Medal and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In addition to her writing, Barbara is a prominent activist and advocate for issues related to the environment, animal rights, and social justice. She has been involved in numerous campaigns and nonprofit organisations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Center for Biological Diversity, and is the founder of the Bellwether Prize for fiction that addresses issues of social justice. Barbara’s book choices are: **Little Women by Louisa May Alcott **Children Of Violence Series, “Martha Quest” By Doris Lessing **Shiloh And Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason **Orlando by Virginia Woolf ** Middlemarch by George Eliot Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season six 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 Six? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

Could you see a demon coming to life on screen? Yes, I can. And that's all I'm allowed to say. Okay. I will leave that there. I like the look in your eyes when you said it. With thanks to Bayley'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 six of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about the books you'll be adding to your 2023 reading list. Welcome back to the podcast, Barbara Kingsolver, an American novelist, essayist, poet and activist. She's published over a dozen, critically acclaimed books, including the best-selling novels, The Poisonwood Bible, the Lacuna and Flight Behavior. And last week became the first author to win the

Women's Prize for Fiction twice, first in 2010 for the Lacuna, and this year's prize was awarded for Demon Copperhead, a reimagining of Dickens's David Copperfield set in poverty-stricken Virginia at the height of the opioid crisis. She's received numerous other literary awards over the course of a career, including the National Humanities Medal and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In addition to her writing, Barbara is a prominent activist and advocate for issues related to the environment, animal rights and social justice. She's been involved in numerous campaigns and non-profit organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Centre for Biological Diversity, and is the founder of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction that addresses issues of social justice.

Welcome back to the podcast, Barbara. Thanks. Hi. Well, it's lovely to see you again. I know I got to speak to you for a slightly more abridged chat when you were shortlisted for the women's prize. And all it's left to say at this point is congratulations. It was so, so brilliant to see you up on that stage. And I know that the speech gave was really moving for a lot of people.

I saw a lot of people talking about it afterwards. But how did it feel for you? I was so completely surprised. I really wasn't expecting it. Lightning does not strike twice in the same place is what I thought. Maybe I said that. It's funny because just about 10 minutes before we gathered beside the stage, my editor, my favorite editor, Louisa Joyner, said, Barbara, have you prepared remarks just in case?

And I said, no, I'm not going to win this thing. I'm going to get my flowers and go home. And so, yeah, I was really, really surprised. And whatever I said, I don't remember, but whatever it was, it must have been true because it just came completely out of the heart of my utter surprise. I'll be honest, I was very surprised myself that you were doing the podcast with me tonight. So the time of recording, it's a Monday. The awards were on the Wednesday in London.

I know you came from the back of a three-week trip here. You're doing your press tour for the book. But it must have been such a whirlwind. How are you feeling, are you jet-lagged? I mean, that's quite a trip. Yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot of interviews in the 20 hours following the announcement. It's, but, you know, I'm, I feel so honored, validated for this book to get this kind of respect is, it's kind of hard to explain what that means.

Not just for me, but mainly for my place and my people. Appalachia does not get much respect. And Appalachia does not, we do not see ourselves. in the media. We don't see ourselves on television or in the movies or in the news or on podcasts. So I guess I could look at it as we're making up for lost time with Demon. It's really so wonderful that this book is getting the attention and the respect that it's gotten. It certainly feels like it's time for that platform, a platform that it deserves. I know we spoke last time about using your voice to raise the voices of others and that is something that can

certainly be done through you know through these accolades and through these prizes and you were saying before 19 interviews in 20 hours it's a lot but does it make it easier I guess knowing I guess reminding yourself of why why this all came about and the goodness that it's doing yeah and I'll say that it's good to be. It's also then the next 20 hours I spent getting home because it's a long home when, you know, it's it's several flights. I don't get to fly directly from home to anywhere. So it's great to be home. It's great to be back in this place to remember that this is what it's all about. Well, I know you've spoken a lot about Demon Copperhead over the past few weeks. We will talk more about your book, but we'll also talk about other books that have shaped you

that you have loved over the course of your whole life. And your first book, Shelfy book that you've brought to the table today is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Generations of readers, young and old, male and female have fallen in love with the March sisters who unite in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War. Little Women explores timeless themes of love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America. Can you tell us why you think you might have picked this book? And also, when did you first read it?

I can remember exactly where I was when I read it and why it had such an effect on me. I was nine years old. I was in the back of a station wagon. My family was, we just, we, we didn't take vacations very often, but when we did, we would just take these epic trips where my mom and dad would say, get in the car. And then we would drive, I don't know, to the Grand Canyon. We didn't even know where we were going. But I had a book. I had just, just gotten this.

I've been reading chapter books for a while, and I had this one from the library. and I disappeared into that book. I remember coming out of it and thinking, wow, for however many hours this was, it was 10 or 15 or 20, however many hours this was, I was not ramped in the back of this station wagon with my grumpy brother and sister. I was in another world. I was, well, let's face it, I was Joe March. Don't we all, when we read that book, want to be Joe March? And I was transported. It's the first time I really understood that experience of literature, what it does for us.

I mean, I guess before that, I had read maybe shorter books or smaller books or for some reason that was the one. that just took me away from me into another time and place and body. And I just, I wanted more of that. So that was the beginning for me, as a reader and probably as a writer. And as a young woman, I mean, did you relate? Did you see any of your childhood in what you were reading? Well, when you're a child, you're not really thinking about your childhood. you're just thinking about life, life and getting through it.

But what I, the reason I loved Joe is that she wanted to be a boy. And I completely felt the same way. I do. I mean, and now looking back on Louise, I think Louisa May Alcott wanted to be a man. And now that I'm a woman, I'm actually, I've, I've come to terms. with it and I'm glad, you know, that I'm perfectly happy in this body and it's like, but when I was nine years old, I saw no good prospects for myself as a girl. It was a rural place. I didn't see, I saw mostly unhappy adult women in very unfulfilling work, either as wives or teachers.

That's all. Those are the only work. women I knew and the telephone operator, I guess. And so I thought, well, there's only one way out of this. If I want an interesting life, I should be a boy. But I didn't really know how to pull that off. But I really got it. That was Joe's central complaint was the confinement of her life as a girl. Can you remember when that might have shifted for you? So, you know, now I've made my peace with it. I've come to terms with it. Did anything change or did you change?

What changed is I got to go to university. I discovered feminism. I discovered a whole lot of women out there who shared what I had thought was a secret complaint that when we look around at the world, the men are flying the planes and the women are serving the drinks. And I just suddenly became friends with all these women who said, screw that. We're throwing the drinks in the pilot's faces and taking over or whatever.

Something that would probably get you in trouble saying that now. But nothing against pilots per se. It's just that notion that we were in charge of nothing. there was a whole movement of women refusing that narrative. And so I joined in. Well, Little Women has been adapted many times the screen. It's reached so many new audiences over and over again. And I know many of your books have been optioned for films or TV shows.

How involved do you typically get in the adaptation process? I think all of my novels have been optioned many times. but none of them has actually been made. And that's because I'm very involved. The people and the issues I write about are pretty personal to me. So it matters to me that an adaptation be not just artfully made, but still mean the same thing in the world that the book did. So I have been very, very choosy.

I've only opted to work with people who really shared my vision. And for whatever reason, there always comes a point where I can see it's not going to work. And so it ends. However, it's interesting you say that right now at this moment, three of my books are in some stage of development. I am very much involved. I have to be a writer. I have to be the writer or a co-writer. that's always been the case with every one of my film deals.

And right now, my union, the screenwriter's union, the WGA is on strike. So everything's on hold right now. And we're prepared for that strike to be pretty long, but we're holding out because screenwriters in the U.S. really need to be, need more respect. And we're fighting for our lives not to be replaced by AI. Could you see Demon coming to life on screen? Yes, I can. And that's all I'm allowed to say.

Okay. I will leave that there. I like the look in your eyes when you said it. Your latest book, Demon Copperhead, it has, of course, just won this year's Women's Prize. What inspired you to write Demon? What do you hope that readers take away from it? And I think, you know, we've spoken about this a little bit before when we've spoken about this a little bit before when we first chatted, but more now than ever that it's, you know, it's been placed on this

pedestal. I wrote it because of where I live, the place and the people and the problems here that are not really, not really being seen, not being addressed. That's the reason I wrote it. And so, of course, you know, for this novel to be as widely read, as embraced as it has been by readers, that it won the women's prize and that it a month ago it won the Pulitzer. The Pulitzer Prize, that's a big deal. This is, this, this, this, I keep saying it's, it's for demon. I'm so happy for demon. I'm so, because demon is, of course, a fictional character, but he's real in a hundred bodies,

in a hundred families, in a thousand, in tens of thousands of families. These kids are real. What they're living with is a lifetime of trauma. And every new reader for every person who encounters this story and thinks in a new way about structural poverty, about addiction, about how these victims are getting blamed, how the resources they need are not coming to them because of societal. contempt for every new person who comes around to a new way of thinking, I'm just grateful. Yeah. Demon's voice is so unique and sage and sparky and foul-mouthed all at once. It perfectly lifts the subject matter of the book, however dark it gets.

We've just talked about those voices that really stay with us, that means something to us in those books that we read when we're young and throughout our lives, how long did it take you to hone demons voice? How did you do that? Three years, start to finish, three years. Listening, letting that voice really sort of arrive and ripen in my ear, sort of thinking about his anger, thinking about his limitations, like he can only speak in the voice that he's learned. He can his grammar, his syntax, all of those, his lexicon is specifically Acoachian. That's a voice, that's a language I know. It's a language I speak. But also remembering that he can, he's a kid. He can only know what he knows. He can't, he can't comment on anything outside of his own sphere.

He can only understand things in the way that, you know, a child with his limited resources and access to the world can understand things. So that's a part of it is sort of getting your brain inside that place and looking out of those eyes. And then it's just a question of revising and revising and revising. I mean that every sentence that you read in the book will have been rewritten between seven and 37 times. The whole book I rewrote many, many times. So in the beginning, he was too angry. It was kind of, he kind of exploded out of the gate. And after I'd written about 50 pages, I thought, okay, I need to dial him back because he's going to, he's going to just, he's going to just put you off, But, you know, before, before I've given you the chance to sort of know and love him.

So, you know, all of those things are just my job. It's just, it just comes with lots and lots of revision. Lots and lots of work. Just listening carefully to every sentence, weighing every word, paring it down to its bones. That's the job. When you say goodbye to that character, when you, when you're finished, Is it difficult to know that that's it?

Yeah, because I could keep revising. I would still be working on my first novel, you know, that I wrote whatever, 32 years ago. If I didn't have an editor saying, Barbara, it's time, deadline. It's really hard to stop because I'm a perfectionist. I think most writers are. We live in a state of continual self-correction. Confidence is not an asset for a writer of fiction. You have to look at every sentence with an eye to how to make it better.

So, yeah, it's very hard to know. I know when it's the deadline and I have to turn it in. But before that, there's always, you know, point of diminishing returns. I mean, the last seven or eight drafts of this novel I wrote with the specific intention of compressing it because the first draft was 700 pages and more than 700 pages long. And I wasn't going to do that to you. So with each successive draft, I, you know, I had a goal of removing 70 pages. That's 10%. And then 70 pages again and 70 pages again. when I got it down closer to five to a, you know, a manageable length and saw that it was very spare.

It was, you know, there was no, no extra, not one extra word in there. And I was starting to, you know, change a word and then change it back. You just get a sense, like, okay, we're about there. It's, you know, it's like baking a cape. You know, you stick in the, you stick in the toothpick and say, almost, almost. Yeah, has it come out clean? Yeah, that's right. 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. Bayleys is the perfect adult treat, whether shaken in a cocktail, over ice cream, or paired with your favourite book. Check out baillies.com for our favourite bailey's recipes. Well, rather than stop, we're moving on now

to your second book-shelphi book, which is from the Children of Violence series, and it's Martha Quest by Doris Lessing. Martha Quest is the second novel of British Nobel Prize in Literature Winner Doris Lessing, and the first of the five-volume semi-operographical Children of Violence series, which traces Martha Quest's life to middle age. Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She's a romantic idealist in revolt against the Puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion and instinct laid bare to experience. Can you tell us what this book means to you? Well, I mean, you just said it all. That's the age I was when I read it. I was a young woman.

I was an adolescent. I was late teens, I think, bristling against. the constraints of my culture, of my place. Doris Lessing, I don't even know where or how I found that book, but it really was a second event of a novel blowing my mind because I saw that she was writing, it wasn't just a matter of, oh, I identify with this character who's really sort of mad at everybody, her mother, her father, everybody in her life.

She's prickly. It was, you know, like Joe March. But I also saw, I mean, this is Doris Lessing. She was writing about what she called the color bar. She was writing, she was writing about racism. She was writing about sexism and segregation. And these bigger issues that I had never really understood. could be the substance of literature.

That was a big deal to understand, oh, I can read, I can read novels not just to be entertained, not just to visit new places of the world like Rhodesia, as it was called then. I can read novels to understand the bigger issues that are all. also important in my life, in my town, because sexism and racism were things that I was seeing and I was thinking about every day in my little town in eastern Kentucky. And so it just resonated with me as something new that I understood literature could do. And I read all five of the children of violence novels ending with the Golden Notebook. I think I was pretty young to be reading the Golden

notebook but it was all just as i said said earlier it primed me so that as soon as i got to university i was i was ready to find those other women who wanted to just like blow blow out the stop blow out all the stops and find a new way of being women in the world as well as raising these issues did the reading this book change of you on how authors can use their voices to drive actual change, tangible change in the world? That's exactly what it seemed to me. I thought people reading this will be, this is going to make people think about the racism and the sexism

that they're experiencing or that they're participating in. It's bringing those things home in an emotional way. And when you got to uni and you found those other women who wanted to, like you said, blow it all out the water change the way that they'd been told things had to be. What did you do with them? What happened next? Well, we all wore flannel shirts and stayed up all night talking about, you know, Virginia Woolf.

And it's just, you know, how we just like we reinvented the world for ourselves. Yeah. And also, I mean, I also had, you know, I had boyfriends and I was just sort of like, you know, be kind of sneaky about having a boyfriend. You've had this long, successful, a brilliant career as a writer. At what point did your love of storytelling and your love of writing happen in this sort of timeline? Was it when you got to university? Did you know you wanted to be a writer before that?

Not at all. No, because books were so... immense and magical and important to me that it never occurred to me that they could be written by ordinary people like me. I sort of felt they were written by entities, you know, by gods and goddesses. So no, I didn't, I mean, I loved to write. I kept a journal from the time I was eight years old. And by the time I was in university, I was writing poems and short stories, which I showed to nobody. It's just something I did.

I think it flowed out of my reading. My writing came from my reading. Just because I was so sort of invested in that sort of narrative explanation of the world, I just did it myself as well. I saw my own life as a narrative and I wrote it down, but it wasn't for anybody. It was just for me. I studied science.

My degree, my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in biology. That's what I thought I would do for a living because I wanted, you know, the most important thing is I was going to earn my own money. I was not going to be a housewife. I was not going to be one of those miserable women that, you know, picked up socks and regretted her life. So I, you know, my studies were practical. And I just wrote because I had to write, but not for not. It was a secret. I didn't tell anybody, kind of like the secret boyfriends.

I had secret poetry. Sometimes they go hand in hand. So when did it stop being a secret? In my early 20s, well, my first, my first job after graduate school was to work as a scientific writer. I just really kind of lucked into this job where I would interview scientists. and then I was paid a salary to translate, you know, what they told me in their scientific language into language that was more comprehensible to non-scientists. So I did that for all kinds of things, for, sometimes for public relations, for magazines.

I did it. I wrote grant proposals, all kinds of science writing. and it was, you know, not so fascinating, algae production and sewage plants or whatever, but whatever I was assigned, I did well, it did to the best of my abilities. And the revelation to me is that I could sit at the desk with a typewriter and at the end of the week get paid for that. To get paid for writing made me understand that this could be a career. So I started pulling out these short stories and poems that I had stashed away for years and years and submitting them to literary magazines.

And just like that, they were getting published. And so I actually, across the Rubicon, I left that salary job, which is the scariest thing I've ever done in my life because in the United States, we have no safety net. So you don't have health care. When you walk away from the salary and benefits, you can't afford to see a doctor. You could end up living on the streets. That's American life.

So it was a huge risk, but I thought, I'm going to try to make it as a freelancer. And not as a novelist, not as a poet. I mean, let's be realistic. But I could take other kinds of assignments and make a living and then maybe move toward writing about things that fascinate me. So I worked for several years as a freelancer, as a springer for various news magazines. I wrote for arts magazines, interviewing artists. I honed my skills as a journalist while also writing poems and stories and getting them published little by little. And then a novel, just kind of a bunch of my stories coalesced into a novel that I have.

had to write. I did not expect anyone to read it. I just had to write it. That was the bean trees. And I wrote it while I was pregnant with my first child. I was working as a freelance journalist during the daytime. Had terrible insomnia. I couldn't sleep. Pregnancy does that to some people. So I thought, I've got some hours at night. I'll write this novel on deadline, nine months, finished it right before, actually 10 months. My first daughter was very,

very cooperative and she was a month late. So she was a 10 month pregnancy. So she gave me that extra time to finish. And I just, I sent it off with no expectation and really, truly none. I'm really good at low expectations. You're probably noticing the theme here.

And I came home from the husband. hospital with my baby, had a message on the machine that my novel is going to be to be published. So I became a mother and a novelist on the same day. Gave birth to two creations. A career. A whole career. I mean, they paid me enough of an advance that I could, I could stop taking the freelance gigs.

I could live on that advance for a year and write another. book, which I did. And then from there on, I've been, I've had one deadline, you know, per year or whatever, you know, I've lived solely from my books ever since. I've never had to teach. I've never had to, you know, like do workshops or any of that for living. I've just been a writer of books. In 1999, you founded the Bellwether Price. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and why you set up? In the late 90, I got a big advance for the Poisonwood Bible. I'm a person who lives in modest circumstances.

I mean, I live in a beautiful old farmhouse, but I just don't need very much. And so, I mean, I was supporting my family, and there was more money suddenly than we needed to live, you know, our modestly comfortable life. And I thought, I'm going to use this to make life easier for some other writer who's doing the kind of work that I want to do that was very hard at that time to get published, which is literature that engages with the problems of the world. So I established

the Bellwether Prize for that exact purpose to help other beginning writers. The prize is given to an unpublished first manuscript. And it's a $25,000 prize with guaranteed publication. So, So it's a prize that really, it's not just like a pat on the back, good job prize. It's a career founding prize. It gives somebody the chance to become an author. It's time to talk about your third book today, which is Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobby Ann Mason. In Shiloh, the author introduces us to her Western Kentucky people and the lives that they

forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, as she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies and video games. Can you tell us why you picked this book? What impact it had it have on you? That book was so important to me because I had been, as a young adult, hiding my background, hiding who I was. When I left Kentucky and went to university in the Midwest,

it wasn't a fancy university or anything. I didn't know about fancy universities. I was just lucky to, you know, get to go. But that's when I discovered that the whole world looks down on hillbillies. My accent, my culture, the whole way I was,

which I thought was normal, was made me a laughingstock when I got to university. I mean, my friends gave me this thing that they thought was so funny. It was a passport. It was a Hoosier passport allowing a certain number of Kentuckians to cross the river into Indiana. People stopped me, like strangers would stop me on the sidewalk or in the dining hall and asked me to pronounce certain words so that they could laugh at me.

And it was stunning to me to learn that the markers of my culture made me an object of derision of so much contempt, which, you know, people thought it was funny. And it wasn't. And so I, without a lot of conscious, I mean, it wasn't a conscious decision, but I gradually changed the way I spoke so that I have. very neutral accent. You can't, you wouldn't know. I mean, I actually do what we call code shifting. When I talk to my neighbors and my family, and I speak Appalachian. I speak my native language.

But when I'm in interviews or talking with anyone else from the outside, I have this very neutral accent. I, and in my, and in my private writing, I, I, I, I was working on. a new persona, I was trying to become not Kentucky, you know, not a hillbilly, not a Kentucky girl. So I wrote these stories about, I don't know, people in Italy and people on yachts and, I don't know, things that I didn't know anything whatsoever about. And there were really stupid stories. But I was just, I was trying to write from some more sophisticated place that people wouldn't laugh at. And, and it was really, the writing was really ridiculously stupid. So, um,

But I didn't know that. You know, it was just trying. I was trying to be a more, a new cosmopolitan Barbara. And so I carried that with me. And I actually became a more cosmopolitan barber because after, after university, I did the thing where you get the, you know, the $200 one way Icelandic air ticket to France. And then I backpacked all around and I did, you know, the low paying jobs. And I lived in, you know, the farmhouse commune with 17 other French socialists and, you know, who get drunk and sing at night.

And I just did, I just had those adventures. And I learned about the world. And I ended up actually, I had to come back to the U.S. for visa reasons and decided I would try out the West because I've never been out there. So I moved to Tucson and kind of kind of got stuck there as, as you do, when life has, you know, jobs. and boyfriends and things. And so getting more serious about my writing, but it was still just voiceless somehow. And somebody gave me,

I actually remember who it was. It was a writer that I met, who had seen some of my stories. And she gave me this book, Shiloh and other stories, written by a Kentuckian about people in Kentucky who worked at Kmart or the gas station and they spoke my language and they lived the lives of the people I knew. And this was a very respected book. This was kind of one of the it books of that year.

And it just once again in a new way blew my mind. I understood all at once that voice comes from authenticity and that this was. writing was so good because Bobby Ann Mason was writing about her own people and that I could do that I could find

a way to do that and not be a joke and after that she led me back to Wendell Berry to Robert Penn Warren to a whole host of Kentucky writers who have you know and I would still maintain that

Appalachian writers haven't been respected, sufficiently respected by the sort of like the New York gatekeepers. But as part of the canon, there they were. There were those books for me to read and rediscover. And in so doing, I found my own voice. And that was the voice of the narrator Taylor Greer, who told the story of the bean trees. She's a girl who grows, that's my first novel. a girl who grows up in Kentucky gets out of there with the soul her sole goal in life is not to get

pregnant because all of her friends, you know, are getting pregnant when they're teenagers. And she wanted to get out of there and she gets an old car and drives west and someone puts a baby in her car. So that's how the novel sort of begins. That's the big plot point. So that novel I wrote in a voice I understood. thanks to Bobby Ann Mason, who later I met and now, now I've thanked her so many times. For that impact, those beautiful, sorrowful, understated stories that leave such an impression.

You know what, when you're talking about code switching and shifting, it's something that I think a lot of us over here will relate to as well. I grew up in Newcastle, up in the north of England, went to uni down south, and you know, you change yourself. You don't want to not fit in. And we were, like everyone would always ask me questions like, oh, do you have, do you have electricity up there? Because there was all these jokes about us up from the north. And also, you know, with my heritage, my Nigerian heritage, as well trying to dampen down parts of myself that I didn't feel would be welcomed.

And it took leaving and going away, traveling to come back and know that actually I want to be the person I was supposed to be from the beginning. But it took a little while to find that voice. And so often literature was the vehicle. Literature was what did that. what helped me. You mentioned there writing across so many different genres and formats. You've written novels to nonfiction to poetry. How do you decide what form your writing will take? The idea comes first and then I decide what vehicle I need to carry it. And I'm, and I'm, I feel really lucky to have all of these different genre at my disposal. All of those things

are vehicles and they all carry different size loads, I would say. A novel is like a station wagon. You can just, you know, you can drive it a long way. You can keep putting more things in, more, you know, a lot of characters, a lot of subplots. It's an accommodating vehicle. A poem is like, I used to say a poem is, like a bicycle and then somebody told me no a poem is like a unicycle and i think that is exactly right because on that vehicle you can carry one thing not very far and the whole beauty of the thing

is the balance i think my natural my natural most natural vehicle is is the station wagon i really love novels. But I also there's also a lot of crossover. I mean, I've worked for years at a time on screenplays. And when I'm right before unsheltered, I spent actually two years working on a screenplay. It will be seen eventually. It's just these things take time. But working as a screenwriter, it's sort of honed skills that I brought back over

into my life as a novelist. And I feel, well, for one thing, I think modeling Demon Copperhead on David Copperfield has a lot to do with this because Dickens, you know, as they say was the screenwriter of his time. I really felt that. I really felt as I was writing it, this is a mini-series. As a novel, it sort of works in that way. It breaks into discrete pieces that have. a cliffhanger at the end so that it moves forward. And so I think that that not this novel will be pretty straightforward to break up into a miniseries. And that's all should that happen. Should that be the case? Well, from station wagons to unicycles, we move on to a fourth

shelf book, which is Orlando by Virginia Woolf, a magnetic tale of love and androgyny charting. The Path of Orlando, a youth in the Elizabethan court who trans migrates into different male and female bodies while retaining the same personality and flair. A wry commentary on gender and history. Orlando spans almost 400 years in the lifetime of its protagonist. Why did you pick this big? Because once again, it blew my mind. I was probably late 20s, early 30s, when I read. it. I had read other Virginia Woolf. I don't know why it took me a while to come around to Orlando, but I was already, at that point, I was, I had written two books. So I was a writer and I was thinking about writing when I read it. And what she did with this character who begins as a man,

becomes a woman, passes actually both directions for the remainder of their 300-year life, was so amazing and it was surreal, but it was also realistic when you read that book. It's not, does it read like science fiction or alternative fiction? It reads as realism. Just to see what she did, with that character and that format and that kind of meta fiction where she's commenting, she's writing fiction about fiction. She's making art about art. The layers in it were so fascinating to me that I finished it and I didn't put it down. I went right back to the beginning

and started reading it again. And I think that I would say for sure that's the first time I've ever done that with the book. I've done that since. But I think that was that that opened new doors for me in terms of reading quite reading and deconstructing the book and really thinking a lot about how did this writer do this. I actually, I read you said in an interview recently, I think with the times, that men are praised for ambition and, women are accused of it. Can you tell us about how you see these inequalities still manifesting themselves in our society? Oh, everywhere. I think that was, that became apparent to me early in my career that when, when, you know, when when journalists or critics spoke with me, they would

always say, well, are you, I mean, in some way or other, they would always ask, are you allowed? to write about this, you know, about subjects this big, you know, colonialism. And I always thought, you wouldn't ask a man that. And I think that we are, we're still struggling with that. I think fiction has made, made some progress in the time, in the time I've been writing it. But I think Nonfiction has not so much. I think women are still a suspect if they write outside of the domestic domain, you know, outside of the confessional or the, you know, the biography or whatever. We are viewed with suspicion if we tackle too much or approach anything with any kind of moral authority. So yeah, there's a lot that hasn't changed in my lifetime. And it's maddening just in the greater society, just basically, you know, I don't know what happened in the UK.

We probably maybe have better, you know, better networks of support. But here in the U.S., when schools closed and all of the kids had to stay at home and then, you know, do their schooling online. and so they needed supervision, who quit their jobs? It was women in droves, not because they didn't like their jobs, but because they were the ones who had to pick up the slack at home. It was just a huge gap in employment and who was able to keep their employment. And we're going to be living with that forever. And so, you know, it's insidious.

It amazes me that, well, I have, two adult daughters. They've both, they're both married and they kept their names. Their last name is Kingselver, same as mine. I kept it and passed it on and they kept it. But so many women, their age, you know, they're at the age where they're going to a lot of weddings and their, their friends give up their names. And I just think you're an adult. This is your identity. And just like that, you surrender it and take on the, I mean, why is that the assumption? Why wouldn't you just assume he would give up his identity and take on yours? Nobody asks, it's just still with us.

Yeah, it goes unquestioned. You talk about deconstructing, deconstructing Orlando and making art about art. Art is an escape for demon in demon copperfield's a way of him expressing his feet. feelings, transcending is often bleak surroundings. And, you know, you're deconstructing. You're deconstructing art, Dickens. Can you talk us through the process of writing Demon Copperhead how you were inspired by Dickens? I was struggling with how to tell this big story I wanted to tell about poverty and orphans and Appalachia. And I couldn't think of a way in. And I was in the UK at the end of my last, my previous book tour, and I stayed at an inn called Bleak House because

it was bleak house. It was the house where Dickens wrote David Copperfield. And I got to sit at his desk late at night and just think about Dickens writing this book that was his own story. It was his very angry story about the way poor people were treated in his society. And I just got that, I just channeled that anger. I just felt it. And I felt him giving me permission. and heard him say, let the child tell the story. And I just thought, okay, I'll let your child tell the story. I just decided there and then to write my version of David Copperfield. And I just saw my demon copperhead right there.

I just got the picture of him with his red hair and his dark skin and his attitude and his foul mouth. And I started writing it there on that desk. And I didn't know how closely I'd could track David Copperfield because it had been a long time since I'd read it. So I downloaded it on my tablet and reread it on the flight home. And I just immediately saw this is going to work. So I actually, I opened a spreadsheet and I put like, I think there's 64 chapters in David Copperfield. And in each cell, I wrote, you know, chapter one.

I am born, you know, he's born, chapter two, Mirdstone. So I filled in each cell what happens in that chapter of David Copperfield and then below, not necessarily in order, but just in, as I thought of them, I figured out modern day equivalents. You know, what's the modern day equivalent to the boot black factory? Well, it's the meth lab, you know, child labor in Victorian times in my time. the boarding school for, you know, indigent boys would be the farm, the foster care farm with these boys that are being used for farm labor. So I started filling in the plot points bit by bit by bit. So I got a pretty good structure to start with before I really began writing, you know, sentences, chapters, scenes, the kind of. scenic writing, but I had that whole architecture of the story laid out and I saw this is going

and I had to jettison a few, you know, I didn't want the book to be 700 pages long. But one thing that I had to work out was the sort of the artistic trajectory of my, my version of David Copperfield, because of course in Dickens's novel, which is, you know, really, very autobiographical, David Copperfield becomes a famous writer. That was not going to happen for my little guy. He could no more imagine it than I could when I was, you know, his age and he had even fewer opportunities than I did to become, you know, famous anything. But I wanted him to develop as an artist because I wanted to give him that creative outlet to to to hold on to which is so important for I think so many of us can relate to this any of us who were bullied who you know who

struggled with peer acceptance um I certainly did in school in in in middle school and high school particularly and to have for me I had my notebooks I had my art I had my my poems and my stories I also had music, I played piano. I needed a demon to have that thing he could retreat into a world where he could sort of create his own power. And of course, it just seems so natural that it would be superheroes because little boys, of course, are obsessed with Marvel comics. And so I had the idea right away of him being good at drawing and drawing cartoons. And it turned out to be so great for demon that he could he could translate his experience into these these cartoons that he made where his is really he has actually a very abusive stepfather who's really mean to him and so demon when

he's locked up in his room he's he's writing these comics where where the stone villain the stepfather's name's stoner the stone villain you know has all these terrible things happen to him his eyeballs pop out and he got like an alligator bites off his his private parts. And this is a little boy's way of finding some control in a world where he has no control over anything. So actually, right over there, a pile of the books that I read while researching this novel. And there are quite a few comic books. I had a really, I had a really book on Marvel Comics. I was not an expert. No, I am. Be like my little brother's absolute heaven.

Exactly, right? Yes. And you get it. You get it. I totally do. I've got three brothers. They were all collectors. They loved them all the Marvel and the Beano and Dandy and everything as well.

It's time to talk about your fifth and final book, Shelfy book, which is Middlemarch by George Elliott. Taking place in the years leading up to the first reform bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life. arts, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships, considered an exemplar of Victorian realism, while also being a novel of deeply considered characters, can find in a plot of social tension in a setting that is a microcosm of a time of a larger societal change. I mean, it's quite the ecosystem of characters and society.

What struck you about this? Why was it important that you brought this to the table today? I chose that book not necessarily because the power it had over me the first time I read it, but because I have continued to read it. I've read, I read middle, reread Middle March at least once in every decade of my life. And every time I'm amazed at how good it is, how perfect it is, and every time it's a new book to me because it speaks to you know, the me that I am at this age, which is very different from the me that I was at age 30 or age 20. And I think there's a maturity to its, as you said, ecosystem of characters and to its sort of the depth of characterizations that we can just relate to in different ways as we grow, as we've become wiser,

wiser with age, we see more things. And I think, you know, in the beginning, I was probably, well, the principal character is trapped into a marriage. She thinks it's going to be, you know, she thinks it's going to be wonderful and exciting and intellectually challenging. And it turns out, no, she gets, she gets to do nothing. There's a theme. You know, that's where I was. in my 20s, like, don't get trapped in that situation where you have to go brain dead and just smile and wear pretty clothes. And then as I've gotten older, I've become more interested in other subplots. There's the character of the physician and his wife who's very materialistic and who just wants, she keeps buying things and she wants to impress the neighbors. And so that like

the, you know, so we have the gender, you know, the gender equality challenges, and then we have the economic challenges, and then we have the sort of the larger picture of the whole village and the village politics. It's a novel about everything. It's just a book of infinite depth. And I just, I so admire George Elliott, who had to publish it under a man's name. How about that? Barbara back in 2013, you asked which of your books you're most proud of and you said the lacuna. Is that still the case now that Demon Copperhead is out in the world, it's getting this incredible reaction and reception? Well, I must have said it because that was the newest book I had published.

But I mean, I always have to say that the most important, of my books is the next one I'm going to write. Okay. And can you say any more about the next one that you're going to write or is that TVC? It's cooking. It's cooking. It's on the back burner. But it's very exciting. I'm really thrilled about it. Well, we can get excited about it. We can look forward to whatever comes next. But just quickly to look back at your life, at your career. What advice, if any, would you give to your youngest self. It's going to get better. That's what I would say, because it has. Every decade of my life has been better than the one before. Every decade has been happier, more comfortable,

more more, more filled with loving and trusting companionship. It just gets better. And I think for women, especially, we don't believe that. There's so many, from so many angles, we're getting the message that, you're only, you're only valuable when you're young. You will soon become obsolete. That's so not true. I am, I'm as happy at 68 as I've ever been. It makes me so happy to hear that and to see that.

just finally from me, if you did have to choose one book from your list as a favourite, I can recap them, which one would it be and why? So we've got Middlemarch, we had Orlando, we had Shiloh and other stories, Children of Violence, we had Martha Quest, and you started with Little Women. Well, I would choose Middlemarch because I know I'm going to read it again, and it's once again going to be another whole book for me. Barbara, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your words.

And thank you so much for your stories, every shape that they take, whether they're a station wagon or a unicycle. And massive congratulations on winning the Women's Prize 2023. Thank you. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This 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.