Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep20: Bookshelfie: Natalie Haynes

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Author, broadcaster, comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes joins Vick to chat about her love for Greek Mythology and why there’s an appetite for female-focused stories. Natalie is a Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 shortlisted author for her novel In A Thousand Ships, which retells the story of the Trojan War from an all-female perspective. Her book Stone Blind tackles the story of Medusa through a feminist lens, and her latest book, Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth is a female-centred look at Olympus and the Furies. She is a  self-declared “classics nerd” who has made her career reinventing Greek myths for a modern audience through her books, stand-up, radio and television.   Natalie’s book choices are: ** The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper ** The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie **  A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki ** If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson ** The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa   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.

I'd never met an author until I was an adult, certainly. It just didn't occur to me that somebody who had the life that I had, which was being the daughter of teachers in Birmingham, would be able to do something like write books. I remember interviewing Fran Leibowitz, the American Humorist, a long time ago now for Radio 4, and I said, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? And she said the minute that I realised that books weren't like trees

and that people made them. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting, because that obviously came to you really young. And for me, it was much later. You know, I liked writing kind of creatively at school, but I don't think it particularly occurred to me that that was a job. 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 6 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. Today I am joined by author, broadcaster, comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes. Natalie is a Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, shortlisted author,

for her novel in A Thousand Ships, which retells the story of the Trojan War from an all-feworthy. perspective. Her book Stoneblind, which I absolutely loved, tackles the story of Medusa through a feminist lens. And her latest book, Divine Might, goddesses in Greek myth, is a female-centered look at Olympus and the Furies. She is a self-declared classics nerd who has made her career reinventing Greek myths from modern audience through her books, stand-up, radio and television. Welcome to the podcast, Ashley. Thanks for having me. I hear you've come from kickboxing this morning. I have. Yeah. Which I like to start the day with compliments.

It's great. Then the rest of the day when people try and hit me in the face at least from practicing. You ready? Yeah, exactly. Train for that. Oh, that's a great way to start the day. And then to sort of segue into chatting about books, it's a bit of everything. That's literally every day for me.

I don't know what to say to you. Yeah, it's always basically combat and then books, sometimes label that. Is reading, I mean, where does it sit for you in what you need to get out of every day? Is it an escape? Is it a grounding? I mean, obviously there'll be a lot of research as well. Yeah, that's the main thing at the moment, certainly, because I'll be starting a new novel in the next couple of months.

When the tour for Divine Might has calmed down a bit, then I'll have to start writing again, because that's the sort of seasons for me. So, yeah, I'm in research mode at the moment, or at least I was in cram writing the tour show mode until last week. I've got it all under control. Don't worry everyone. But, yeah, now I'm back to be able to read on trains instead of going,

which is what I was doing for quite, quite, while before that. And when you do read on trains, what are you reading? I am currently reading Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, which is a poem, an epic poem, quite a short epic poem, if you can have such a thing, which I last read when I was an undergraduate, I think. And I've dipped into it since then

because I wrote a chapter about Medea in Pandora's Jar, my last non-fiction book before Divine Might. But I haven't read the whole thing in one go. So, yeah, and I'm going back to the Greek, which slows me down quite a lot. I'm afraid. Just for ease. Yeah, just to check. Well, because there's that thing where.

I know. If you want to rework sources, and I do, you know, I did it with 1,000 ships. And before that, with Children of Jakaster, and obviously with Stoneblinder, although with Stoneblinder, it was much harder because there was so few literary sources to use. I don't want it to be the version of that Greek or Latin text that has been. rewritten by not in a mean way a man in the first half of the 20th century because that's going to be their misogynistic patriarchal worldview you know perhaps unintentionally but it's still there and I don't want that in my brain when I'm trying to think about the story so I like to go back to the Greek even though it slows me right down

when you return to something having read it originally as an undergrad and I remember because the distant distant past but when I read things because I had to for my degree and I was doing languages so often I was reading them in translation just to get through them

just so I could write my essay Yes I well know your pain don't worry yeah you return to them maybe you have a bit more time to read them but also with just a little bit more love in my heart

because I'm not on a deadline I'm not on a deadline anymore have you felt that shit I've been on a deadline I'm kidding me I've written half a million words in the last six years. No, I just don't know what it's like.

I don't know what it's like. If anything, I have worse essay crises now than I did then. Because then, I think I had to write eight essays and eight weeks every term. So it was quite tight. Although obviously there were short terms, so Crimea River passed me. But now, yeah, I write a book in theory every 18 months. But every year, I also make a series of the radio show, stand up for the classics for Radio 4.

And that takes me a couple of months. I'm the only person writing it. the only researcher, the only writer, it's all just me. And Mary, our brilliant producer, of course, but I have to do their writing. And then I'm on tour with whichever book is out at any given time, usually about three months. So in every 12 months, I only have seven to write anything.

So every 18 months sounds like a lot to write a book, and then you realise it's closer to nine. It doesn't even sound like a lot to write a book, to be honest. To be honest. Do you get a chance to read purely, purely, purely for pleasure? Is that even a thing? because I guess any bit of reading could lead to

inspiration, it could lead to an idea. That's the thing, you can't afford to not be reading for fun. And yet at the same time, it's a bit of a challenge. I think there was a more difficult time to do it in my life was probably 2012,

13, because in 2012, I judged the women's prize or the orange prizes it was then. 2013, I judged the Booker Prize and then 2014 I judged the Independent Fiction Prize, which is now the international book folded in.

So I read about 350 novels and I don't know 18, 20 months, something like that. And at the end of it, I remember standing in front of my bookshelves and looking at them and saying to my then partner, what do I like? I don't know. Because you're always having to read for work like that. And I remember liking crime fiction.

Oh, yeah, maybe go for a murder mystery. And then, of course, because crime writers are incredibly productive, there were loads of writers that I really liked who brought out like nine books. There's so many books. So I was really pleased. It opens your eyes with this whole other world. I don't think I'd ever really read a thriller until I judged the women's prize.

Right. And then all of a sudden, not that I'd look down on them, I just thought they weren't for me. All of a sudden my eyes were opened and I realized all of these authors had these massive bag lists. I was like,

well, how can I get through these now? Yeah. Because I want to. Choch, I feel like I have to. But I know that feeling I went gradually and said, I loved judging it. But I went gradually and saying, this post-it's all over my flat.

Yeah. saying some really arsey things like, oh, it destroyed and restored me. But it had to be done. I coped better with the moment's price than the booker, truthfully. So if they ask you, I'm just giving you a warning. I loved it. But the day I finished book 50,

50 books arrived in the post. And I read 151 books in 204 days. And I always really insist on remembering the 151st because it was a thousand and four pages long. And the day it arrived, I knelt down and wept in my hall. I can't read anymore it was like being bludgeoned with a book I would get up at five

read a novel and then start work because it was the only way to get through the days and I was so insane with lack of sleep and too many words I remember turning up to a press day and thinking I wouldn't be able to go but I really wanted to at the British Museum

and they were doing their Pompeian Herculeanum exhibition so I guess that must have been 2013 and I turned up, I'd read the novel, got up early, read the novel, was fully insane, walked into town, because that was the only exercise I ever got, and got there. It was a really cold day. And I was like, hello, I'm here for the press thing. And they were like, okay, Natalie. And they looked slightly sort of unnerved. And I was like, maybe I've done something wrong. And I was like, am I early? And they went, oh, yeah, yeah, you're two hours early. I'm like, okay, sorry, should I go and read a book somewhere? And they were like, no, you can go. So I got to go around on my own. That was my reward for being insane. I know. What a tremendous win for me. And a few years later, you took up kickboxing so that you could be attacked by hand rather than bludgeoned by a book. Exactly, yeah, because this way it's so much safer, I think, getting kicked in the head. Let's talk about the first book that you brought today for Bookshelfy, which is The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper.

Oh, my goodness. The Dark is Rising as a series of fantasy books for children and young adults by Susan Cooper. Technically cheating by picking a series and not one title, but we will pick the second. And the actual Darkest Rising book. I was going to let you have this one. But okay, well then in that case, everyone should read all of them. All of them. But if you're only going to read one, I pick the second in the series,

which is not like me because normally I'm very serialistic about things, but they're standalone until later. So it's okay to read Darkest Rising without having read over Sey understone. It has different characters. Book two. Yeah. Well, the series itself published between 1965, 1997. These books depict a struggle between forces of good, the lights, and evil, the dark,

drawing upon ancient legends mythology and folklore. Let's go straight in with book two then. So why are you picking that? It's probably the book I have read the most times in my life. It's set around just before Christmas in a very cold winter. And Will is one of, he's the youngest of masses of siblings, not all fully present at the start of the book. His brother Stephen is away.

And it's his birthday at midwinter, and the thing he wishes for is snow, and the snow begins to fall and the dark rises. And Will discovers, I don't want to spoil this book, because it's so wonderful, Will discovers very early on that he is going to be needed to fight this terrifying force. These are myths which is not all my specialist area, which is Greek myth or Roman myth to a lesser degree, but these myths of the British Isles, which allow for things like Herne the Hunter, and this sort of sense that winter is a deeply powerful time for despair,

which I think is something that is quite hard to relate to when you're in the southern Mediterranean, where the dark and the cold just don't have the same effect. It's just the most extraordinary. I'm trying not to say illuminating because it sounds like a pun, but it does make you see that the sort of retreat from growth, the retreat from light and joy that comes in the winter is sort of a part of the approach.

process and that by doing that by kind of retreating in that way you can and only then perhaps summon up the strength to to rise and fight and and be the forces of good once again. When did you first read this? I was really quite small. My mom was an English teacher before I was born and then she went into adult education so we had a house full of books that she had read or read and taught and so I was pretty young I think when I first read The Darkest Rising and I was very young. I think when I first read The Darkest Rising and I was just so beguiled by it. You know, her language of place is absolutely incredible.

The geography is small, you know, it's local. It doesn't go very far from this particular spot in the icy winter of Buckinghamshire. But it's so detailed. You know, she really understands the outside. I mean, fantastically so, given that the author of Susan Cooper had moved to the US before she wrote it. So it's, in a way, I think it's a love letter to home. So it's stuck in my memory of it. I read it every Christmas.

Really? Yeah, of course. And you read it at that time. I mean, obviously, for a reason, it's evocative of what's happening around you. Yeah. And it's a sort of, it's that winter that you don't very often get anymore because the climate has changed. But when the book is set, when the book was written, snowy winters, snowy Christmases were not at all a surprise. So it's this sense of, of it being, everything is normal and then suddenly really abnormal.

So at the beginning of the book, the family is all kind of, chattering and jabbering in the kitchen and it's all noisy. And suddenly the radio screeches when Will goes near it and this doesn't normally happen. And then the dogs get really kind of edgy around him and, you know, they're his dogs. And so he's really sort of upset. So he goes to feed the rabbits and the rabbits are sort of cowering away from him and he knows something is wrong. And I think that sense of the sort of horrible uncanny that you can create with these, I mean, just really small scenes where she just really nails that sense that something

something is wrong and the animals can sense it. The static is in the air and you know something's going to happen, but we don't yet know what it is. So you read this first at quite a young age. Yeah, I was probably about eight, I think. And were you a big reading? I mean, you said, you were your mother's a machine. Yeah, we had a house full of books.

My dad was a history teacher. My mum had been an English teacher and my grandmother worked at a bookshop. Right. So, yeah, I had a constant supply. And my grandmother, she worked in the children's books bit of what was then Hudson's books and then became Dillens. Does anyone remember Dillens in the distant past? And then it became a Waterstones,

and now I think it's the Apple Store. So Birmingham has gone through the full circle of evolution there in a way. And so the book reps, you know, the people who go around book shops to say, would you like to stop this book? It's great. Would you like to stop that book? It's great. Those people came in with, you know, proof copies.

I didn't even realize that proof copies were a different thing from a regular book at the time. So there were things like Dick King Smith who wrote, the sheep pig, which became the film Babe. I had one of his books called The Queen's Nose, I think, which is about a sort of enchanted 50-pence piece. And I didn't realise there was ever a different cover. You know, I had the proof copy cover, which was just sort of, I think it was plain purple, plain lilac colour, I think,

with a picture of 50-pence, and at least, that's how I remember it vividly, so I've probably invented that memory. But these reps always brought my grandmother more and more books because they knew she'd got grandchildren who would gobble them up. And so, yeah. And was that what sparked your interest in, in mythology, in wanting to tell stories, write stories as well as, you know, consume them? I don't think exactly, because I was quite a lot older than that before I realized that people like me could write books.

I think I'd never met an author until I was an adult, certainly. It just didn't occur to me that somebody who had the life that I had, which was being the daughter of teachers in Birmingham, would be able to do something like write books. I remember interviewing Fran Leibowitz, the American humorist, a long time ago. go now for Radio 4 and I said when did you know you wanted to be a writer and she said the minute that I realized that books weren't like treats and that people made them and I thought oh that's really that's really interesting because that obviously came to you really young and for me it was much later you know I liked writing kind of creatively at school but I don't think it particularly

occurred to me that that was a job no no I remember it wasn't until we were quite lucky the author David Armand yes he came to our school in Newcastle. That's what you want. And he came and I guess he was talking about, it was Kit's Wilderness and Skellig. Yeah. Skellig's a terrific, isn't it? And I was like, oh, it's a person.

Yeah, they made those words. He made those words. He's from Newcastle like us. And it was such a light bulb moment. Yeah, yeah. But you do need to have that realization. Otherwise, of course you think that these just grow in trees, these proof coffees that just pop up in the library.

Yeah, of course. And it seems so strange to me now not to have, not to have that kind of, I know that people expect me to say, yes, I was this, you know, very bookish child. And I was a very bookish child and read books constantly. And yet it never occurred to me that the act of being a writer was an extension of the act of being a reader. Well, your second book, Shelby book, is a work of absolute genius. It's a masterpiece, the murder of Roger Akroyband. It's Christy.

Isn't it great? Published in 1926, this was Christy's third novel, who feature Hercul Poirre and is considered to be one of her greatest and also most controversial mysteries. It breaks the rules of a traditional mystery. It leads to Poirot being utterly

startled as he investigates the overdose of widow Ferris and the murder of her fiancée, Roger Ackhoed, less than 24 hours later. Why did you choose this? Why do you love it so much? Well, two reasons. I was a huge Christine nut growing up in my teens.

I think it's hard not to be patronising about her writing if you say that, but I think she does and does deliberately use quite simple language to tell quite complicated stories, or quite complicated plots, perhaps. I think that's part of why she's been so successfully translated into dozens and dozens of languages, why she's never out of print. And they are really easy books to read. And so as a teenager, I essentially moved from children's books to murder mysteries and to Christy, to Dorothy Alsayorahem, to Nio Marsh. And I think there's something so satisfying about those kind of golden age

crime fiction novels because essentially what you have is this extremely neat world which was both totally alien to me and totally familiar, you know, set in this past that wasn't my past but there was certainly within the lifespan of my grandparents for example, although my grandmother was

Flemish, so it wasn't her background on my grandfather, you know, painted cars in Birmingham, so it certainly wasn't his. But this sense that there was this kind of idealised 20s or 30s with obviously the sort of overspill of the first world war but with no sense of the impending fear of the second and Christie's writing is really clever you know even when it looks like the book is in the 30s often it's sort of the 50s you know the 50s are sort of being disguised

as the past in their own way yeah the wars are always slightly withdrawn from the from the front even though of course poro has survived the first world war so you have this very very neat world and then it's suddenly thrown into chaos. The murder makes everything break and so people's secrets are found out they start lying because they are trying to protect not themselves for having committed a crime but their privacy their secret desires the things that they want or fear and then gradually and inevitably order is replaced the detective essentially is god in the world of the murder mystery and we as the reader are following his steps as he and it is a hymn in this instance

and obviously Miss Marple just as joyous for me but Roger Ackwood is such a fantastic novel precisely because Christie knows the rules so well she literally makes the rules or jointly makes the rules with other great crime writers of the era and then she breaks them and she does it over and over again actually I think people often dismiss her as a source of ongoing irritation to me

that we treat for example Ian Fleming as a great British novelist and Agatha Christie is something sort of safe and chocolate boxy. It's like, one, Fleming is obsessed with brand names and it's so trivial in vain, but anyway, and two, Christy is only because she's so productive, I think, that people

underestimate her. To be fair, I think the same is true of Woodhouse. She makes it look easy, and so people think it must have been easy, but yeah, try writing one, they're really difficult. And with Roger Ackroyd, she takes the rules that you expect her to follow, and she does follow them, but in a way

so specific, that she can get away with murder. And it's just magical. And, you know, she does it. I don't want to spoil very many of these books. I don't want to spoil Roger Aquit. But, you know, she does it where she takes examples where everyone is the murderer or sometimes no one is the murderer.

The detective is the murderer. There's one where a child, a child is the murderer. And this is, I think, a cozy chocolate boxy, Agatha Christie, where a small child turns out of it on the sidal maniac. And you're like, yeah, she's the least sentimental writer. I think partly because she'd worked in a pharmacy, I guess, so she knew quite a lot about poison. She was really interested in them in a relatively cerebral way, I would assume.

But also, you know, she was really interested in the past. She married an archaeologist, and so she has this very forensic kind of attitude to the world and trying to make stories around artefacts, which, after all, is what archaeologists are essentially doing. I don't know, she just has this fantastic capacity to take the trivial and make it momentous. within a story which seems like it could be very slight,

but actually has a lot more weight than I think people assume. When it comes to storytelling and creating stories out of artifacts, out of what we know, why do you love Greek mythology so much? Because it's great. The thing about Greek mythology is that the unit of currency is a human life. Right? So there are lots of types of myth, where everything happens on a really grand scale.

You know, you have a gigantic bird or a gigantic snake or a gigantic tree. And it's like, yeah, absolutely. But with Greek myth, it's incredibly human. It's incredibly human focus. So I suppose you could argue that it's the most appropriately, the most narcissistic type of myth. But even the gods are pretty human in their petulance, their, you know, temper tantrums.

They're super powerful, but they have no self-control. they're like toddlers. And so human lives are always in play. They're always at stake. And when the gods decide to, you know, turn on a person, as happens to, you know, Edpus, for example, and Jakasta, then there's always the possibility that they will be caught up in the same way. You know, Zheu's loses his own son and in the Iliad.

He loses Sarpodon. And that's not, you know, it's devastating, but he still has to kind of live with it. You know, we have a lot of texts of Greek myth, far more than we have perhaps of quite a lot of other myth cycles and myth cultures. But generally there is something so profound. You know, these archetypes are so profound. There's a reason where Freud was drawn to Greek myth over, say, Norse myth.

And I think partly that's to do with the slight snobbishness of the time in which Freud was living where, you know, the Greeks were celebrated as being a sort of high-minded culture, which, I mean, you know, the Greek miracle, as people used to call it. And it's like, well, I'm not really. that comfortable with that. The Greeks, of course, were tremendous magpies and, of course, stole stuff from all over the place. They got their alphabet and monetary ideas from the Phoenicians. For example, the Phoenicians were really were geniuses, but we don't have much writing about them. So we credit the Greeks with a lot of their discoveries and things. But the things that they

did have were the ability to tell stories in an absolutely unparalleled way. And although we've lost the vast majority of Greek literature, perhaps as much as 99% of it, what we have is just extraordinary and discoveries are still being made relatively recently you know we've got from Sappho's nine books of lyric poetry we've got three poems yeah how mad is that these one of those was was I was I was I was say discovered but I think presented is probably more accurate in 2014 so not just within my lifetime but within a very young person's lifetime quantity of Sappho poems has gone up by 50% so we've done really well 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. Hi, I'm Sam Baker and welcome to The Shift. The podcast that aims to tell the no-holds-bar truth about being a woman. post 40. I started the shift because I was so tired of the absence of older women's voices. Where had all the women over 40 gone? I mean, seriously, if you want to walk about in your pyjamas for the rest of your life, we're invisible. Each episode I speak to an inspiring woman about her shift. I feel very strong and think I genuinely don't care what anybody thinks

of me. Join me every Tuesday, wherever you listen to your podcasts. The third book that you're bringing today is A Tale for the Time Being by Rutha Zeki. That's a great book. It's a certainly is and she is an absolutely exquisite writer. This is an autobiographical novel published in 2013, which went on to be shortlisted for that year's Man Booker Prize and translated into 28 languages. It tells the stories of 16-year-old now in Tokyo, who is documenting her great grandmother's life as a Buddhist nun, and Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island on the other side of the Pacific, who is pulled into Now's life in a way she never expected. What is it about this book and Ruth's writing style that's so captivating? Well, I was on the booker panel that chose this book for the shortlist.

And so I wasn't kidding when I said I read 151 novels in 204 days. And there were moments. And it's true of every one of the shortlisted books from that year where you opened a book and thought, oh, thank God. it's like sinking into a warm bath you say oh my god you can just really write everything is going to be fine you can really really write and so

what you got what I got anyway from reading tale for the time being and you get the book so early you know this year you get a proof copy long before the book is out so you can't you're not going on other people's buzz or other people's ideas no there's nothing you're just

properly going for it I read it as I say you know It was surrounded by books, both on my shelves and in my head. And it was such a glorious kind of technical a piece of writing that Nal's diary, now has grown up in the US and then they have to move back to her parents have to move back, but for her it's new to Japan. And it's just magnificent. It's just a magnificent piece of writing.

And it's intercut with this much more kind of sedately paced story of Ruth's, Zeki, who finds the diary near her home in Canada and is trying to work out if now is real and who she might be and if she's in trouble. And so it has a sort of thriller structure, but as is the way with Zeki's writing always, it's the interleaving of stories that makes it so compelling, actually. It's not the plot. It's the way that the two different stories are layered into one another. She's a super smart writer. Well, she won the Women's Prize of Fiction in 2022 with. with the Book of Form and Emptiness.

You've of course been a judge for the prize in 2012 and also shortlisted for the prize in 2020 with the thousand ships. Was it like being up for an award that you've been on the inside off? It's nice because you know how lucky you are. That's the thing. And the thing about the women's prize, unless it's changed dramatically since I judged it, is the chair of judges reads everything,

but all the other books are divided up. So each judge reads about a fifth of the submissions. And so you know that in order to make the long list in the first place, at which point everyone then starts to read everything, you really do only have two goes. You know, the chair who's reading everything, so they're pretty busy, and the person who gets your book. And that's just, you know, I have no idea how it's allotted.

And when I judged it, there was certainly no bit where you could say, oh, I think I'm going to like this one, or I'm looking forward to that or anything. So you know it's luck a bit. You know, you have to write a book that people hopefully are going to enjoy in large numbers, but you also have to get the right person on the right day because you know how this goes. Sometimes, you know, the book is wonderful, but it's not the right book for you at that point.

And you don't know who's going to be judging and you don't know what their taste is going to be and you don't know if you'll fulfil it. So I knew both times I was longlisted for ships and for Stoneblind that I had, you know, I'd rolled a dice and got a really happy six both times. And it's quite hard talking about it with people outside of the book world, I think, because they think you're being sort of, mock humble when you say

yeah I'm really lucky they're like no you wrote a really great book it's like babe I wrote a bunch of books they didn't all get as lucky as this so yeah I was really really aware of what a treat it was but also it was really strange because my year was the pandemic year

so the last party I went to before the world closed was the long list party in 2020 and then by the time I got the email saying that it was shortlisted, I think I'd just done like an online kickboxing class on my own in my flat. And you get the mail early, you know, like a couple of weeks before, three weeks,

maybe before it's announced. At the time, of course, we didn't know when the prize would be or even kind of if the prize would be. And my editor sent me this email saying, you know, I've got this wonderful news, but it's secret for three weeks. And I was thinking, well, who would I tell? I know. It's like, I don't, I went for a walk.

you know, on my own to sort of celebrate it. It was such a strange thing and I came back and, you know, I'm not like a big drinker and I would never drink alone. It's like, well, I don't, I don't know, what do I do? It's like, yay. Just sat there, feeling really pleased. And then it was so weird because obviously it felt both like the world was ending and also I had this incredible wonderful secret that I couldn't share with anyone.

And so eventually I cracked, I probably shouldn't admit to this on record, I cracked and rang my mom because I knew she would keep it secret. I knew she would be really happy. She would go to leak it to the sun. No, yeah, good point. Yeah, 500 quid. Oh my God, once it was made public, which I think went out on front row, I was trying to explain to my mom that keeping a sort of safe distance from people

didn't mean stopping strangers in the street to tell them that I've been shortlisted for the women's prize. But I'm pretty sure that's why she was like, please don't get COVID because you're a proud mother. This is not the answer that anyone won. So, but yeah, it was very, I mean, and then the prize was delayed, of course, right, into September. So it was sort of strangely lovely that I got to be on the shortlist for, I don't know, only six months. So, yeah, no, I loved it. I just loved it. It was such a nice feeling.

And obviously, you know, it meant that lots and lots of people read ships who otherwise wouldn't have done. Yeah, the Women's Prize totally changed my career. It's funny you mention that sort of humbleness. I remember Ruth getting a. on that stage and just saying, I never win things. Yeah, I know. I never win things that she truly meant to. Yeah, do you want it back?

In some kind of accounting era. Yeah, she was like, I do, I mean. And I remember in her acceptance speech as well, she said, now more than ever, this is a time that we need to rewrite the dominant narratives. Yes. That have landed us into quite dire straits. And I imagine that you are pretty aligned to her sentiment. Yeah, absolutely.

And why now for you? I think it's kind of what I've always done, except for a while there wasn't a market for it. So when I wrote The Children of DeCaster, I think the only female-centric Greek retelling I'd read was Margaret Atwood's Penelopeead, which came out in 2000s, I think. So it was a lot earlier.

It's very short, brilliant book. It's sort of timeless, you know, that her version of Penelope is, in the underworld and she has this kind of, I said, she's sort of Dorothy Parker-esque. She's really sort of snarky and it doesn't feel like it's sort of aiming to be ancient Greek-esque, but it's just a totally timeless, brilliant piece of writing. And so when I wrote Jakasta, which came out in 2017, so I guess we were trying to sell it in 2016, but yet no one was interested, absolutely no one was interested.

And when I say no one was interested, I don't mean, you know, in a sort of, oh, poor me, everyone didn't get back to me straight away. I mean, I had to change agents and publishers over it because no one was interested. And then by the time I brought Stoneblind out in 2022, people were like, why are so many people doing Greek men three times? I don't know. I was doing ages ago. Sure, that was not my fault. What am I stupid? Oh, wait. So I think probably there are two things in play. The first is that it's a lot easier for readers to contact publishers, not necessarily, you know, here's a sterny worded green letter,

but readers are making their preferences much clearer, basically because social media exists, because of Instagram, because of TikTok, there are stacks of readers, especially there are stacks of young women readers, and there always were, I was one, you were one, but publishers were bringing out the books that they thought book buyers, whoever they might be, wanted. And we were right there going, I'm actually really interested. Oh, never mind, it doesn't matter, because there was no way of registering that interest.

I wrote Jakasta because I wanted to reese a version of the Oedipus story that focused on the women. Jocaster in the Sophocles play, Oedipus, the King, has 120 lines. And it's like, well, I'm not saying that I don't want the focus to learn Edipus on that play. it's the most perfectly structured tragedy to exist, I think, probably. But I still want to know what happens to her. What about her? Excuse me, I have a question. And is Maney, who is the narrator of half of that book,

the younger daughter of Jocaster. She has 60 lines in Sophoclesus and Antigone. So half is my name. I mean, it's just these are such marginalised characters. And I thought, well, you know, I've seen a version of Oedipus the King where he, in the second act, which they inserted, obviously.

They did the story the way you expect it, kills his father, marries his mother. And then in the second act, they said, well, what happens if we go back to the point where he kills his father and he doesn't kill him? What happens if they have a conversation? What happens if they find out who they are? And it survived that.

So I thought, well, it can probably survive me. It's a really old myth. It's something like, all the other myths will still exist. It hasn't got like terrifying fan bros, so that's all right. So I thought, well, I'll try it. And it was okay. And then I thought with ships,

you know, there was so many, Euripides plays which focus on women. Of the eight Euripides plays about the Trojan War, seven of them have women as title characters. And I thought, I want to tell the story of the whole war like this. I want to write a kind of epic narrative and see what happens when you take this entire war narrative and only look at the women's stories from the edges. And so I guess I thought it was overdue and that's the other thing. There's this swelling of interest in it from readers, but also there's certainly from my perspective, lucky, thing, which is that for so long, classics was a male preserve, and classicists were an almost entirely male group, but a few kind of incredible women also managing to study it, but certainly was nothing like half or anything as deviant as equality. And so those stories just haven't been told. The stories that were being told, even when you have female authors writing about the age world like Mary Renaud, she focuses on male heroes or poets Simonides in the praise singer and so it was just good luck really it's like oh great if no one's if no one's

writing about women in these stories I'm really interested in women in these stories and so was euripides so was of it you know this isn't a modern idea but no one else is doing it let's do it so I thought I would well on the subject of amplifying women's voices and also filling in those gaps your fourth bookshelf a book is if not winter yeah flattlance of sappho by and cars published in 2003. No, it wasn't. That can't be true. Oh no. How is that possible?

It flies when you have fun. This translation of the ancient Greek poet Sappho's work pieces together her poems through the fragments. We talked about this just before the tiny fragments that remain of them. She said to have written nine books of lyrics, but only one complete poem has survived. And Carson doesn't try and fill in the gaps per se between the missing lines. Instead, she leaves them open as white space and brackets.

it's saying, I like to think that the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. Tell us about this book and why Sappho's work is so important. So Sappho is an incredibly opaque figure, no matter how you try to interrogate her. It's really, really hard. I made an episode of Natalie Haynes, It Sounds Up for the Classics, about her a few years ago now. And those shows are 28 minutes long. And I had gone through all the things we definitely know. about Sappho by minute two

the rest of it is or just like hokey-coki-coki because you know we have biographical details but they're largely invented by men later on so Ovid for example includes in his Herodes

and the Herodes are a set of utterly wonderful letters from the women of Greek myth to their absent menfolk and I feel very close to these poems because I have always really mocked Pliny for the fact that when Vesuvius erupted, he stayed at home and read Livy, which is how he survived it and his uncle, Pliny the Elder, didn't. But when it felt like

the world was ending and everything closed in 2020, I thought, maybe I'll translate an Ovid poem every week and make a video for people, I am him. How's this happened? So I made a series of videos about the heredoress called Ovid, not COVID. And every week I would translate a Latin poem and every week I'd make a little film about this heroine or that heroine. The first one is Penelope writing to, well, Ulysses, because it's of it, so it's Latin, but Odysseus in Greek. And so I already kind of felt like I was in these poems. And I still didn't remember until I got there practically that the last of them, there's 15, and then there's three paired sets, is Sappho, as though she were a woman of myth herself.

and his version of her has her, you know, declaring her love for her, has abandoned her, a boatman called Phion, I think, and he's utterly gorgeous. And it's like, there's loads of things wrong with this, you know, not least the fact that Sappho is, you know, traumatized over a handsome young man leaving her because he satisfied her in a way that women never have. And you're like, Ovid, come on, sort it out. But, you know, that's one of the many difficulties with Sappho is because our ancient sources obviously had far more of her poet. than we do to look at, but some of the fragments are just a single word, some are just a couple of words. You know, it's so difficult trying to find out who she is. And because she was so brilliant, in ancient times, this isn't a modern construct, to suggest that she shouldn't be included among the nine great lyric poets of whom she is,

you'll be unsurprised here the only woman, but she should instead be considered the tenth muse. And one of the reasons I find this really interesting is because it's, It's one of those ways in which misogyny is really hard to call out because it looks like a compliment. It definitely isn't. You know, it's like, well, she's too good to be a poet. It sounds so nice. She must be a goddess. It's like.

Be real women. So yeah, exactly. So she can't be real. So other women couldn't do this is what you're saying. And it's like, well, sure, other women can't be Sappho. There was only Sappho who could be Sappho. But the idea that there's somehow something inhuman about it really troubles me that when women are good at something, they've somehow cheated by being, you know, partly divine.

It's like, yeah. So I have been reading Sappho since I was at school, and she was valued hugely in ancient times. Catullus, who is a Roman poet from the first century BC translates one of her, or adapts one of her poems from Greek into Latin. It begins, in English, it begins, the man who sits opposite you seems to me to be like a god, because it gets to, you know, feast to. desires on this extraordinary and beautiful woman. But the truth is that Sappho both is and always will be incredibly opaque to us. It's really, really hard to know when you read the fragments that we have, whether these are poems in her own voice or whether their poems she's putting in someone else's voice. It's hard to know if, you know, what these poems were for. People would certainly have commissioned her to write poems like wedding songs and things like that,

or almost certainly, I should say. So are these poems in her voice when she talks about women, or when she talks about men, I don't know and nor does anyone, and that is why she is an ongoing mystery. If you were going to be stuck on a desert island with anyone, then the work of Sappho wouldn't be a bad place to start. I think it would keep you busy for ages. I do just want to pick up on

one thing, because you mentioned there about discussing it on the radio and the stand-up show, signs up for classics. Entering the world of comedy. Yes. But coming at it from this approach,

It's a quite unique approach. And presumably through footlights at Cambridge. But I didn't do any material about classics until I wrote Ancient Guide to Modern Life, which was 2010. All my stand-up, my whole stand-up career, which was about 10 or 12 years long, I guess. I did Edinburgh in 2000, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. But you would have gone a long time waiting for a joke about something in the ancient world. Yeah. It wasn't really something I could get.

away with on the circuit in the 1990s and early 90s. Maybe that journey from Cambridge Classics graduate through footlights to the first ever women nominated for Beth Newcoma Perry Award at Edinburgh. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the comedy circuit. Why do you say right now I couldn't have made one of those jokes then? Why did you feel that way? How were you treated?

It was a very misogynistic world and in a way it sort of seems worse now looking back on it because now we know better if you see what I mean. Oh, a lot of things we're looking back on now, especially in comedy and thinking, we've really just accepted that. Yeah, we really, really did. And so, yeah, I graduated in 96, so I was on the circuit from 97, really, until I quit touring in 2007. So I'd been doing open spots before, while I was still at university, but not many, because I was still learning how to do it. But, you know, comedy clubs were an absolutely raucous place to be anyone and certainly to be a woman. We were about a 10th, I think. And you would never be on a bill with other

women. You know, if there was more than one woman on a bill, the joke used to go, it must be International Women's Day. And that was not really a joke. I remember being told by a booker when he was offering me a date. I was probably getting, I don't know, 20 pounds or something to do 10 minutes. And I said, oh, could I come on this day? Because I've got another gig like the day before, so I could come to London for that and then I'd only have to pay one train fare. It's so broke in those days. And he said, oh yeah, no, sorry Natalie. We've got another special act on that night. And a special act, for those of you, not fully Ophay with the language of Vorderville, is a speciality act. So that's like a magician or someone with a guitar or a woman.

Yeah, okay, I'm just taking my speciality uterus over there. That's all right with everyone. So it was just like that. And it honestly didn't occur to me that it could be different from that. When I left comedy, you know, well over a decade after I'd started, women were still about 10%. and again it's changed so much since then there's much less of it than there was in those days you know a lot more people prefer to get their comedy on places like YouTube

and you know that's fair enough but it has been really strange looking back over the last few weeks and thinking how mainly I just think I was so brave in my twenties and now if I don't know how my parents I mean they certainly were traumatised when I went into stand up and at the time I thought why can't they just support me and now I think I don't know how to they didn't lock me up in a tower.

I'd have been like, don't go out and do that. It'll be really frightening. And I always feel really happy that I was a comedian because it's given me the superpower of being able to go out and talk about my books anyway. You know, I can tour each book. I have the radio series, which has built my audience hugely.

I love performing. But when I look back now on the life I had to lead in order to be where I am, there are times when I'm surprised. It all worked out. It's time to talk about your fifth and final book today, which is The Memory Police by Yokowawa. This Japanese science fiction novel,

Oh, yes, is a haunting fable about an island where disappearance is a way of life. Things constantly vanish or are removed by the memory police. And once something is missing, it no longer has any meaning. Hailed as a masterpiece, this dystopian tale is a meditation on loss of identity and the transience of the self. How did this book affect you?

What questions did it raise for you? Well, many, not least, because I think it was published in Japan in the mid-90s, I think it was 95 maybe. It wasn't translated into English and it wasn't available in the UK until I think 2020 or maybe 2019. So it had this incredibly long period, this long lag, which isn't that unusual.

translated fiction or historically hasn't been that unusual in translated fiction. There's more of a market for it now. And so when I read it, I thought it was, for want to a better word, new. And it was like, even by the standards of now, it felt incredibly prescient. And then to discover it was already 25 years old, what? Who are you? How did you do that? And so, I mean, it's just an extraordinary and really haunting book, not least because, as you say, things disappear and they're sort of outlawed, but like really ordinary things, like, you know, cups or books or just ordinary presaic everyday things. And they're just sort of ruled by a force that we can't explain. They're just decided to now not exist anymore.

And people then develop. It's so brilliantly done. Then develop a sort of, firstly, they feel really worried that they're not going to be able to have the things that they are used to. And then they develop a sort of horror, like an aversion to the, and there are sort of, you know, group burnings of them. And people destroy them. They're like, oh, what, and then the things just sort of disappear.

And then the words for them disappear. The references to them disappear. The person that we're following in this story is a novelist. And so she is used to be able to capture the world with words. and then suddenly that's not really an option anymore. And a few people on this island where she lives retain memory of the lost objects. And that includes an narrator's editor, but also includes her mother. And so they are trying to kind of squirrel away examples of things which are then removed in secret places,

but it's extremely dangerous. The memory police are extremely frightening, a really oppressive authoritarian force. And so we have this character who can't find the words or place these things in her mind. She can sort of half find them, but not quite, because they're gone. And yet she has these two poles, her editor, who they have to hide and her mother, who can remember. It's such an extraordinary story. I think they're adapting it as a film and it's one of those things where you think, I don't know whether I'm happy or afraid at this point.

Yeah, because it seems to me the world of interior. for a less pretentious, adding word, is so intense in this novel. You know, you're so in her head and in her world and how you think and how you describe things to yourself. It's such an integral part of it, and it's really hard to imagine any other form than the novel, capturing that quite as beautifully.

Do other novels ever influence your own writing, whether intentionally or subconsciously? I mean, I think subconsciously, everything you read probably does at some level. say the most influential piece of writing for what I've ended up doing and it took a long time for it to sink in is probably a short story by Borges called the House of Astaireon and in the House of Asteroon it's a really short story and I'm sorry that I'm about to spoil it for you if you haven't read it I can't recommend enough that you currently pause go away and read it

and then come back it will honestly only take you 10 minutes go go go go yeah shoot come back okay So the has Visterion just a few pages long, and it follows Theseus as he goes into the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, except it doesn't, because it tells the story from the perspective of this terrified, desperately lonely, aching for company Minotaur at the centre of the maze. And so at the final moment, he's so desperate for someone to talk to, to see just anything.

and then in the final moment the story flips and Theis comes out of the labyrinth and he says to Ariadne who's the half-sister of the Vastirion which is the name of the minor talk although people don't often remember he says would you believe it

he didn't even put up a fight and it's just brilliant oh my God you know the monster isn't the monster the monster is the victim are you kidding me and then at the last minute that switch in focus I fully and deliberately

stole slash paid homage to in the Pan Thessaleo chapter and a thousand ships where at the very end of that scene it flips to Achilles perspective as the only time in the whole book that you see anything from a man's point of view and he suddenly realizes that she was the Amazon Queen rather

than another man on the battlefield and that was because I've realised that I needed to say somewhere in my work, thank you. Borges is an absolute card-carrying genius I just love him but yeah the way that he can take these tiny

tiny stories secret miracle there's like three pages long and I literally gasped the first time I read it like like like that so yeah him for sure

he isn't one of your five points a day is not but my final question to you Natalie is if you had to choose one book from your list as a favourite which would it be Sappho okay easy

Sappho I would pick Sappho because firstly the Greek is manageable but quite difficult so I spend a lot of time thinking about language. If I'd only got one book, I would really want to spend a good year or two thinking about the Greek, yeah. And then there are the gaps and what would go in the gaps, and that would occupy me for probably,

you know, 30 years. And then I'd that I could think about the poetry. Well, you've given us all lots to think about today some absolutely stunning selections. And it's just been an absolute pleasure to chat to you. And I'm going to take up kickboxing as well. Good, come to the dojo. Come on. I'm coming.

Good. Thank you so much. and best of luck with the new Vic as well. 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.