Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep5: Bookshelfie: Poorna Bell

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Author, journalist and powerlifter Poorna Bell discusses love, loss, the depiction of South India in literature and female representation in the male-dominated world of sports. Poorna Bell is an award-winning journalist, author and powerlifter(!) who writes across mental and physical wellbeing, women and diversity. Poorna has published three works of non-fiction: Chase The Rainbow, In Search of Silence and Stronger, which is part memoir, part manifesto about women's strength and fitness. In 2019 she won Stylist's Rising Star award, Red magazine's Big Book Award and secured a Sunday Times Sports Book Accolade in 2022. Her debut novel In Case of Emergency is out now. Poorna’s book choices: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Beloved by Toni Morrison My Fight, Your Fight by Ronda Rousey Luster by Raven Leilani Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey 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.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. slash Toronto. I was also reading, I think, ahead of where I should have been at a particular age. So I remember reading Perry Mason at about 9 or 10, and someone saw me reading it and thought I was using it as a prop.

And I just looked at them because that wouldn't have even occurred to me. I was just like, I'm 9. Why would I want to just look like I'm reading this book? I know. What's the point? I know. 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. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This year's 20203 shortlist is out now. Have you read any of these six brilliant books yet? Well, if not, head over to the Women's Prize website to discover them now. Today's guest is Purnabelle, an award-winning journalist, author and powerlifter who writes across mental and physical well-being, women's and diversity. Purner has published three works of nonfiction,

Chase the Rainbow in Search of Silence and Stronger, which is part memoir, part manifesto, about women's strength and fitness. In 2019, she won Stylist Rising Star Award, Red Magazine's Big Book Award, and secured a Sunday Times sportsbook accolade in 2022. Her debut novel, in case of emergency, is out now. Welcome to the podcast, Purner.

Thank you so much for having me, Vic. We've already been having, like, a little therapy session. before we even started recording. I've been following you on Twitter for such a long time and I found such strength in all the things that you say, all the things that you touch on, all of your opinions. So I knew that talking to you would be quite an experience, something very special.

I mean, that's a really lovely thing to say because my Twitter personality is like a much more amped up version of who I am. And I never really know how those tweets are going to land. I try and be as fair in them as possible, but there is a lot of sass in them, I think, as well. Well, for anyone uninitiated, what sort of things do you like to cover on the micro blogging site? I mean, it will literally be something like Jacket Potatoes to a take on what's going on in terms of politics or something I'm really loving at the moment is the discourse that is happening around, let's say, women, like heterosexual women who are in marriages. but where they feel like they're doing the onus of like the housework

and all of these stories of women who are just like not putting up with it anymore. So that's kind of a little rabbit hole that I've got on my, there's a hashtag called Married but Single. And it's basically charting the experiences of these women who are also having to take care of their husbands because the husbands just aren't pulling their way. You do touch on so many issues affecting women, whether it's through tweets or whether it's through your work as a journalist

or whether it's for your writing, your books, you've really harnessed your voice to help others. Where do you think that's come from? I mean, that's incredibly kind of you to say that. I don't think it's ever really been something that's, you know, particularly intentional, but I think that the roots of it definitely begin in my early years as a journalist. I think that it became really apparent to me very, very early on, actually.

So I started out in sort of like Asia, because I couldn't really get a job in the mainstream at that time. And it was there that I realized how important it was to be able to write about things that either people weren't writing about, you know, especially if you look at marginalized communities and also if you come from a marginalized community and you work as a journalist or if you have a voice, however tiny that voice is, that it's important to use it because not everyone else is necessarily going to advocate for you, right? so you kind of in some regards have to advocate for yourself.

And I just think as the years have gone on and the bigger my platform has gotten and so on and the places that I get to write for, it's never lost on me how important that is to be able to do that. I think it might come for my mother, mainly because it was a conversation that I had with her recently. She's such a bold personality. You know, she's never been sort of someone

who's been particularly shy and we had this conversation where she just said with great empathy actually which is something that I forget sometimes about her is she just said you know if people need help but they can't help themselves and you are in a position to be able to help them then you absolutely should help them

but you have to also be boundaryed around that in terms of how much of yourself you give to that because there is also something to be said for people that I see on Twitter who I do see particularly let's say in the advocacy space or the activist space where I wonder how their mental health is going because they give so much of themselves that I wonder how they are looking after themselves in all of that. I'm looking forward to talking to you about boundaries later in the

podcast because we've already had a little session as I said before before we started recording but we're going to be talking all about books you've made quite a foray into books writing your own books but as a reader how have you been immersed in? for your life. You've always been a keen reader. I think it's the first thing that I can remember doing even beyond writing, to be honest. I think the idea of being lost inside a world of books has just been something that I remember from a really, really young age. I've always been interested in magical realism and in, yeah, in fantasy worlds and just something that just takes you, not necessarily takes you away from real reality,

but just shows you bigger ways of thinking and bigger ways of being, right? So I've had a fairly unusual childhood in the sense that I was born in the UK, but when I was seven, my parents and my sister and I moved back to India for about five years, which is where, you know, our family is from. And I remember that really formative time in India going, you know, to the library or just having books in our lives was a really big part of that experience also because, you didn't really like TV wasn't great there and this was sort of on the cusp of when satellite TV was coming in so books are really your main form of entertainment apart from maybe like running around and playing with your friends it's been your entertainment it's been your escape by the sound of things and it sounds like it's also been your empathy like when you see the world through other eyes when you you zoom out and see the bigger picture like you just mentioned you learn to be kinder because you learn that we're not all the same well let's talk about you're not all the same well let's talk about you're about the books that you've brought today. Your first book, Shelfy Book, is The God of Small Things by Arundati Roy.

Set in Kerala in 1969, this truly epic debut novel made Roy the literary sensation of the 90s and follows twins, Rahel and Esther as they grow up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother's factory amid scenes of political turbulence across India. Tell us about this book. When did you read this? I read this book when it came out. So I would have been about 16 years old. And it was such an impactful book for a few reasons. So my family and I, we came back to England when I was 12 and my sister would have been, you know, 16. But we've always had, I don't even know if I would say it's a dual identity because my identity, let's say, as a British Asian, is not the same as other British Asians because we lived there.

And, you know, so India's been part of who we are. not necessarily been at a remove that we kind of like might visit, you know, every few years. But during this period of time, I grew up in very, very white Kent suburbia. And so although we would sometimes periodically go back to India, it was a place that I definitely craved being in as a person because when I was there, although, you know, the irony being that Indians don't necessarily consider me and my sister to necessarily be Indian. It felt more comfortable there. I didn't feel like my skin color stood out as much.

It was just I could be who I wanted to be. And it wasn't this thing that I was aware of all the time. But growing up in Kent, you know, especially like in the 90s, there were no, for me anyway, there were no, you know, South Asian women on the cover of magazines. The representation that I would see on TV was very minimal. And when it was there, it did not resemble, you know, the people that I knew. and that I grew up in. And to kind of add an even sharper layer of intersectionality,

when the British Asian community is depicted in the UK, it is predominantly in the north. And I come from the south. We have different facial features. We have different textured hair. We have different food and practices. And so I still didn't see any of that reflected. And when this book came out, this book is set in Kerala,

which is the neighboring state to Karnataka, which is where my family come from. And I could see like so many of the similarities. You know, my grandfather owned a farm. We used to go to this factory that, this was back in India, that one of our uncles used to own, which was a jam-making factory.

So sometimes we would have days out where we would go and you would be in orchards and there would be passion fruit. And so all of those, you know, commonalities that's in the god of small things. However tenuous, I was like, oh my gosh, this reminds me of home, you know, or aspects of home.

And because one of the characters in there, Chaco, he is the uncle of the twins. He moved to England for a time and he comes back to Kerala where they are. But even the mention of that of like, you know, underwear from Marks and Spencers and sort of stuff in your suitcase with things from England to bring back home to India, that is something that, again, it was a thing that was so familiar to us, but we'd never really talked about it to anyone else. that my mom would do the shopping for an India trip for two months ahead of actually going there. When you asked me earlier about, you know, things like when you advocate for other people

or talking about marginalized communities, like Arundathi Roy, in this book, talks about and touches upon something that is so underrepresented, which is the caste system in India. So in it, Amu, who is, you know, this woman in her, I would say, early 30s who has, no, sorry, in her 20s, who has moved, you know, back home after a failed marriage with her twins. She falls in love with Valutha, who is from the Dalit cast. And they, you know, in India, the sort of the byword for it very offensively is the untouchable cast. and the way that she talks about castism in that book was so ahead of its time and I just remember reading it and I just remember thinking at that age this is so unjust like how is this a system that is stapled into a society where just because of someone's

birth and circumstance they're treated in a particular way it just seems so wrong but the way she has written this book is so beautiful it's so accessible I think and I just remember thinking I have never read anything like this because at the time at school I was reading stuff like Chaucer and Shakespeare and there was nothing like this. Very relatable. Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about the importance of representation on this podcast.

Children deserve to see themselves on the pages of the books they read. It validates them. You find confidence in that. You realize that your story is worth telling. What kind of books were you reading as a child? I think that depends on which age because I think that like a lot of really small kids, you know, you would read things like Enid Blyton. I mean, obviously now we know what we know.

Yeah. But yeah, there was a lot of Enid Blyton. But having said that I was also reading, I think, ahead of where I should have been at a particular age. So I remember reading Perry Mason at about 9 or 10 and someone saw me reading it and thought I was using it as a prop. And I just looked at them. Because that wouldn't have even occurred to me. I was just like, I'm nine.

Why would I want to just look like I'm reading this book? What's the point? I know. And I think they said to my mum, is she actually reading it? My mom said, yes, as opposed to what? No, she's just, you know, acting out a sketch, you know, as a baby actress. No. So there was a lot of Nancy Drew.

That was a hell of a lot of a lot of comics as well. So in India in particular, you know, there was a huge comic book culture. So definitely I would say it was a complete mixture of things. But then I came when we moved to England and I went into secondary school, predominantly what we were reading were books by white authors. And I feel like that's probably why. So I won like the English Prize at GCSE level. And they said, oh, you can pick any book.

and I picked Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children because I think at that age, because I was aware of who he was at that age, and that was something that I just, it was a yearning actually to just read books that reflected more of where I was from and also just could learn about things that weren't about, you know, I don't know, dusty pilgrims for like from the 15th century.

My mom was the same. She made sure that I had so many books pressed in my hand about, you know, about where we were from about our culture, our heritage. Stories, you know, not history books as such, but just to know that this is important too. Yeah. This world exists and it's your world too.

How have writers like Arundtie Roy inspired your own writing? Because it sounds like you always had that storytelling flair. Her writing, I mean, because it's so interesting, because after that book, she did not write anything for decades and she really moved into activism in a big way. but I think at that time what her book showed me I mean it was a debut that won the booker right

it sounds really I don't know how to say this because obviously she is in a completely different sphere of like writing to myself but it showed me that it was possible and it was really important that it was a female author because at the time I remember you know you had someone Rishi

and you had Hanif Koreshi but it was important that was a female author because even though in my lifetime I'm likely never going to win the booker that's okay I don't say that but it's it's on it is it showed me that it was possible for someone to come out of nowhere and to write this book and for the merit of the writing to be so strong and so powerful that it could win one of the biggest prizes in the world it does mean the world to see that to know that to just know that in your bones but it's time to talk about your second bookshelfy which is beloved by Tony Morrison, a book that comes up time and time again on bookshelfy,

part lyrical ghost story, part profound reflection on the evils of slavery. Tony Morrison's Pulitzer-winning masterpiece is the emotionally devastating story of former slave sect of the secrets from her past that refused to stay buried, which herald the mysterious arrival of a woman calling herself only beloved. it. Why did you pick this one? Apart from the fact that I love this book and have loved this book for a very long time, when I left school, I went to university and I very, I don't know, because I didn't get this from a guidance counselor who laughed when I said I wanted to be a

journalist and I didn't really get this from my parents who, they were very supportive of me, but they had no previous experience of, you know, the fact that I wanted to be a journalist. to get into writing and that's not the background they came from. But when I went to university, I knew very adamantly that I wanted to go to a university that had a broad and diverse range of modules. I did not want to go into university to study yet again more and more of the same of dusty white, old male authors. The dusty pilgrims.

Yeah, the dusty pilgrims. I just didn't. And so the university that I chose, which was Queen Mary's, had some very specific modules in it that met that need. need and it did two, which I did, which was one was post-colonial literature and one was Afro-American literature. And one of those modules very specifically covered literature that touched upon slavery and so on. And that taught me so much. It opened my mind not just to the actual literature, but obviously the history that surrounds it in a way that I had not been

taught, you know, around history when I was in school and definitely not. not around literature. And I remember that book in particular was just so impactful. Just because you opened that book to any page, every word, every line in that book has so much meaning in it. It is so beautifully crafted.

But I think, apart from how significant that book was, because from memory, I think it won the Pulitzer, was how it talked about love and how it talked about grief. So really, Beloved is the living embodiment of Sethers' grief and guilt, really, you know, that's been poured into a person. So if anyone hasn't read the book, I'm trying to like, I'm trying to talk about it without giving too much away. But in it, there are concepts around the push and pull of, let's say, you know, motherhood and those relationships that you might have with your mother. Guilt plays a massive role in that.

It also is intersectional because, you know, even within the community. that they have, sort of who is perceived to have more wealth and privilege within that community is also why certain people get ostracized within that. And I felt like it was a very nuanced way of looking at that particular period in time as well. But I just think, Beloved is this really uncomfortable, slightly malevolent presence. And it's also just the artistry of like Tony Morrison weaving in a ghost that's actually a person that actually also talks to such huge themes around slavery and fear and guilt and trauma and all of those other things. And there is a line in there that just remains, I think, one of my favourite quotes about love,

which is, you know, thin love ain't love at all. And that has got to do with when someone is asking Sether or accusing her and saying that her love is too, thick her love is too intense I love her for saying that because I just think I feel like that about things I feel like that about life that loving things intensely is sometimes when someone accuses you of that or says you're like that it's a derogatory thing when I think that that's everything like I think if you can't love intensely what's the point of everything I was talking to someone about this just the other day feel things so intensely and it It means that every day can be quite hard, but I wouldn't change it for the world because

the ability to feel some of the most horrendous things intensely also means I have the ability to feel some of the best things so intensely. When you say that grief is this living embodiment, is that your experience? So I've experienced grief in terms of my late husband Rob passed away in 2015, and I don't know if I would say it's a living embodiment, but I would say that it kind of makes your

reality quantum in a way because there's a reality before and there's the reality after and the reality before just seems so shockingly simple that there's a part of you that almost resents is the wrong word

but I almost wish I had appreciated it more because I don't think I appreciated how simple life could be. And then after it happened, you feel as if there are parts of you just pulling in so many different directions and there are so many different emotions that are happening to you all at the same time. You know, like in Beloved, love and guilt are so much like they're dominant emotions that you feel around that as well as like, you know, loss. And where do you put all of that? Because your life doesn't stop. You're kind of feeling all of those things and

it's all on the surface and then you have to go and buy your coffee from a coffee shop and have a chat with a work colleague and inside your brain is literally like exploding and imploding and remaking itself. So my appreciation of what grief is and how it affects people differently has definitely changed over time. But the way I see it, if we're talking about like, let's say living embodiment, the way I see it when people say that, you know, I'm not the same person that I was before that that grief happened. The living embodiment I have of that is that I feel like there is a version

of me, like a part of me, that was buried on the day that my husband was buried. And that actually helped me to kind of come to terms with it in a sense that rather than trying to get back to who I was before, there is a grief that's also for her. There's a grief that's also for that person. And it sounds really heavy and really sad, but I feel it's kind of necessary in order to move on because I think that something that prevents people from moving forward in grief is the inability to let go of who you were and to reconcile that maybe that's just not who you're ever going to be again. And that's okay because you can turn into something different. You can fill your life with different things.

you said you need to find somewhere to put those feelings to put that love to put that guilt your debut book Chase the Rainbow is a beautifully written memoir and love story about your life with your husband rob and your own grief after he died did writing it help you to process any of your own grief did writing it give you somewhere to put some of that love and some of that loss and some of that guilt I think when I wrote it and when I wrote the follow-up to that which was in search of silence, if I'm being really honest with you, I think that I was still very much going through it. So, for example, I would never be able to write that book now. And I sort of reread parts of that book sometimes because I wrote it a year after he passed away or less than that.

And I don't really know how I did it. I guess the way that I did it was because everything was catharsis. Everything was like fire. Everything was in free fall. That it was something that gave me comfort in order to be, you know, because people say to me, oh, that must have been really painful. It's like, no, it wasn't painful because I think in comparison to what was going on at the time, there wasn't anything that could make that more painful.

What I think it did was, is that it helped me to connect to a community. that helped me to feel less alone, but also I still get asked about that book now where someone said it made them make sense of something that seemed senseless. And that to me was the entire reason why I wrote that book because I felt like I wanted that book

to be around when Rob was alive, to understand what he was going through, and I couldn't really find anything out there. But it was also something about legacy. I wanted, I mean, what is a book, if not one of the most enduring? things that you can do in terms of preserving a person's memory. And the fact that there is something about him that will go on to help other people

who might be in a similar situation, I felt was maybe selfishly so for me a really necessary part of healing around that, I think. Well, you've done a lot of work to raise awareness of mental health problems, addiction as well in men, subjects that are, of course, deeply personal to you. And we were talking about it before, I said I'd bring it up. How do you do that work, but also hold your boundaries to keep your own mental health in check? So I do have fairly strong boundaries. And I think that the way that I do it is I'm just very bounderied about how much I talk about it and who I talk about it to.

For instance, it's very rare that I will talk about the entire process or the entire story of us because I feel like there's enough stuff out there. So if someone wants to talk to me about it, I'll just say I'm really sorry, I don't think we can talk about it. On social media, I do get sent messages from people who, for them, like, their grief is quite fresh, right? And so they will ask me or they will say, I'm going through this thing. I don't know what to do. My life is, you know, it doesn't make sense or whatever. And I don't get sent those messages necessarily very often, but I do respond to them. As long as it's like a message that I feel I can respond to and it's not, you know, a complete dump of emotions on me.

I do definitely like send them, you know, either guides to resources or help them with that. But then that's where I'll sort of draw the line. And I know that I have to preserve my own mental well-being within that because if I don't, I will then need to spend like the next few days just mentally recovering from that. And I have spent way too long, like just having to learn that lesson and having to, understand that, you know, no one has appointed me as, you know, the monitor to talk about this stuff. There are lots of other people that also talk about this stuff. And I think that my life has moved on or moved forward as it should do. And it's just about, I think, gently saying to people, yes, there's a book about this. You could read about this. But it doesn't necessarily mean I want

to be asked about it all the time. 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. Bailey's 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. Your third book, Shelby Book, is My Fight, Your Fight by Rhonda Rousey. in this way. There's a little giggle. You can't hear it necessarily on the mic. There's a little giggle.

In this inspiring and moving book, Rousey, the Olympic medalist in judo, reigning UFC women's bantamweight champion and Hollywood star, charts her difficult path to glory. She recalls her toughest fights both in and outside the octagon, reveals the painful loss of her father, the intensity of her training, her battles with love, and ultimately what it takes to become the toughest woman on earth. Why the laugh? The reason why I laugh is because I'm really not a sporty, or I didn't used to be a sporty person. So the idea of me suggesting a sports book is for me hilarious

because I just don't read in the genre at all, as was also winning a Sunday Times sports book award because, again, that's hilarious to me because I was just so bad at anything to do. with physical activity. The giggle is also because, you know, this book I think is well written, whether or not it's ghost written, I don't know.

But, you know, it's not going to win any literary prizes anytime soon. But there is a very specific reason why I've picked this book. So I was working at Huff Post at the time and I got sent a copy of this book, you know, as a sort of proof for me to read. Now, normally I would not have necessarily read this book. But at the time, I was taking some very tentative baby steps into learning how to lift weights.

Of course. It was very, very much out of my comfort zone. The gym was literally around the corner from the office. But what was happening was at the time, because I was someone who'd never lifted weights before, you know, things have gotten a lot better in 2023. But like if you consider that this was back in 2016, you know, the idea of women sort of getting strong or learning. how to lift weights or whatever, was not as ubiquitous, let's say, as it is now. And at the time,

I knew that I really loved lifting weights, but it also still felt like there weren't that many women in the weight section. And also it was something that people seemed to find really funny, like that I was doing it. And the more I got into it, and especially when I then shifted into competitively weightlifting, so I took up powerlifting, was that this book, in particular, was really pivotal to me feeling confident about being in that space. So Rhonda is like a elite athlete, right?

So we do not have any, I am not an elite athlete. I'm like a part-time athlete at best. But she is an elite athlete, but what I really took from her book, and I think really the title is brilliant, because it's not just about her career, you know, in MMA or whatever it is,

it's about saying that what she has gone through and what she has fought for and what she continues to fight for. She's fighting for the rest of us. The other women who are being pigeonholed and boxed in by certain tropes or stereotypes that we have about what is deemed to be feminine and what is deemed to be masculine. And there's this amazing quote of hers, which is too long to say on the podcast. But basically, it's about the fact that she gets a lot of criticism or used to get a lot of criticism for looking like. hypermasculine or being masculine or whatever. And she was saying that, you know, every muscle in her body has a purpose. And her body is an instrument that is actually for something versus just looking

pretty, you know. And I think at that time when I read that, that was really, really important to me because one of the things that people would say to me when I started lifting weights was, oh, make sure you don't get too muscular, make sure you don't get too bulky. And that pisses me off because you would never say that to a man. Like, you know, if anything, a guy would be sort of cheered on for getting bigger quote marks. Games, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And also, there's so much like fat phobia around like what we deem to be like acceptable in terms of what bigger looks like, whether it's fat or muscle. You know, there shouldn't necessarily be like positives or negatives attached to that stuff. And I think what that really cemented or lit a fire under me, really,

was just this rage that because of these stereotypes that we have around what is deemed to be masculine or feminine or whatever, the whole thing is just such nonsense because it's just stuff we've made up as a society is that it's preventing women from accessing something that not only will make you physically stronger, therefore more self-sufficient, therefore more able to do the things that you want to do,

but also, especially as a woman in my 40s, you know, when I kind of look down the line to how I make myself or ensure against things like broken bones or like heart disease and all of those kinds of things is that weight training is just a fundamental part of how you build up your bone density or how you get good heart health and that to me is unforgivable that we have these massive blockers in society that have pushed us out of occupying that space and those are the very things that are going to ensure that we might have a better or a healthier future as we get older. as women. Well, your third book, Stronger, is about reframing how we see strength, how we see

fitness in women and in girls, and how they can tap into their own physical and mental strength. So can you tell us a bit about your journey to writing this book? So the book is a mixture of memoir, so it's my own experience of basically taking up powerlifting in my late 30s. So this is something that's like very, very new to me, like even doing a sport, right? That for me was a life-changing thing because for the first time in my entire life, it turned physical activity from something that I'd been told was primarily about weight loss or weight maintenance into something that was actually about achievement and ability. And it also reframed it as something that could positively affect not just your physical health, but your mental health as well.

And when I say mental health, I obviously don't mean that exercises are cure for like mental illness, I mean as in just contributes your baseline of mental well-being, right? And what it did was, it made me feel more confident, it made me feel more secure within myself and the actual practice of lifting weights because it's something that I would go into a lot of sessions, especially at the beginning, believing that I couldn't possibly do lift X, Y and Z, and then I would be able to do it, and then that overturned this narrative of basically being self-defeating all the time, is that I then began to look at what that was like for other women in different sports and saw that there were a lot of parallels, but also what is underpinning the entire book is the fact that there is a

massive gender gap that begins when girls are really small and then continues as we go into adulthood. And there are all of these blockers that are there from how we're taught about sport at school, you know, how we engage with it. Also just, you know, sexism and just generally how male athletes are paid versus female athletes and the disparity between all of that. And I wanted to just basically put forward a book that would allow women to be able to look at things that have been holding them back from engaging, let's say, with some form of physical activity to also just kind of be the arm on the shoulder to tell them, you know, if you have told yourself this narrative that you're terrible at sports or that you're just not a physical

fitness type of person, that that's not your narrative. That's something that you've been told, that's something that's been moulded around you, and that's not really who you are. And you absolutely belong in this space, and you should be able to access all of this stuff. And then I wanted them to be able to confront that and then rebuild that for themselves. I remember working with this girl can a couple of, last year, a couple of years ago. Yeah. And going into schools and meeting girls around the eight, but between 14 and 16, because after 16, physical education is not compulsory anymore.

and the rates of girls dropping out was just so high and there were so many reasons and I was thinking back to all the reasons that I didn't always feel comfortable I didn't really want to do sport at school because of this narrative that's been woven around it and that we, you know, we're buy into, we're conditioned by and I remember thinking, okay, what can we do about this

and like how can we help? But also being really, really impressed with these girls because they got it. I was so overwhelmed by how much better they, they were than I was at that age. And it does make me think, we're going in the right direction. We're not there yet. But it was the way that they were jeeing each other up.

They were supporting each other. And they got that this is important. And they should have that space. And they were claiming that space. And it makes me happy to hear that. It's time to talk about your fourth book now, which is The Brilliant Luster by Raven Lailani. Oh, which was on the long list for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

I think the year that I judged it. So 2021. This novel follows Edie, a black woman in her 20s who lives in New York City and works as an editorial assistant. Between phoning her in at her dead-end job and sleeping with all the wrong men, she meets Eric, a white, middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort of agreed to an open marriage. With nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling headfirst into Eric's home and family. Why did this book resonate with you? think about this book all the time. This book broke me out of a cycle of reading a lot of fantasy and YA, which I was reading during the pandemic because I found it really comforting.

But I was aware that I did want to read books that were maybe more literary and this was the book that snapped me out of it. Aside from the fact that I think Raven is one of the most beautiful writers that I've come across in a really, really long time. Like it is, it is, has been a while since I've annotated a book as much as I've annotated hers. I just think it's that line between poetry and prose. And she has such an economy with words. Like she says so much with actually so little. And that is probably the style of writing that I love the most and that I admire the most.

But also she captures, you know, Edie's experience. Like I think that when she's given interviews about her book in the past, I think that one of the things that she has done, so brilliantly with this book was that number one she said she wanted to look at black women in the workplace and those sort of like microaggressions and how that actually you know what that looks like for someone especially of her age she's sort of butting heads with I think the only other black woman who works in this yeah right and she says you know we both graduated from the school of twice as good for half as much right and I thought that that the way that she

wrote about the sort of the pressure and the margin for error being so much smaller than it is for other people. I thought that that was brilliantly done. But also Ede, as she has said herself, is, you know, she's a mess. So she said something about wanting to write about the darkness within E.D. But also the darkness that she faces in society and how society will react to her and treat her. And I just think the way that she manages to, incorporate all of that within this story where she's, you know, in this slightly strange relationship with Eric. And then she ends up, you know, actually meeting his wife and sort of staying with them for a bit and so on. And I won't go into too much detail beyond that. But I just thought she

handled all of those topics so deftly. And that book has won a ton of prizes. The fact that it was published in 2021, which, you know, was a hard year for publishing for books to be. breakthrough. I just think she's an incredible author and I just can't wait to see more of what she comes out with. And it's such a wild ride. It is such a wild ride. And it's such a interesting insight into a generation of women that like I feel is really important for me to know about as someone in my 40s, I don't just want to hang around with people who are the same age as me. I I learned so much from that book and I want to be able to have the humility to say that I want to learn from people who are much younger than me who can still teach me stuff about

myself or teach me stuff about them that helps me to understand the world a bit better. But the details in it are, you know, like for example, Edie, like just not eating before she goes on a date where she knows she's probably going to have sex and then when it just doesn't work out or she doesn't end up having sex, she's just like, ah, you know, I can't believe it. I could have like eaten something on that day. And it's just the details are so human. And so I just, I just love the fact that exactly like

the kind of conversations or her internal monologue that she's having, it was true to life versus like an exaggerated version or a sort of hyper romanticised version of what that entire process is actually like. I remember thinking at the time, and this doesn't do it justice saying this, but it feels like,

me and my friends group WhatsApp. Yes, yes, it's exactly that. This is so relatable. I remember thinking with the long list that year, this book is the one that speaks to me the most. This is depicting my reality. Yeah. And it was an amazing thing.

We're talking about a wild ride in case of emergency is your first fiction book. How did you find that process of switching from writing facts and personal experiences to letting your imagination run wild? Not going to lie, it was a really difficult experience

because non-fiction, whatever the subject matter, is an extension of, you know, a journalism career that I've had for about 20 years. So it's a space that I'm very comfortable in and the research around that and interviewing people and so on, no matter how much of my own experience I might be bringing into it. But fiction is,

it's exactly that you are creating an entire world that has to stand up and live and breathe on its own once you release it out into the world. And I think that there are so many, authors, right, that I admire that sometimes I do understand how people just feel paralyzed by that because you, especially I think as a journalist, when you have peers that have also written books, there is a sense of imposter syndrome around this of, you know, I want to do something and I would like it to be good and oh my gosh, will it ever, you know, add up and so on. But I think

the fundamental thing I had to realize about that process was rather than writing a book that would make everyone think how clever I was. I just needed to write a book that felt really true to what I wanted to put out in the world, the conversations that I wanted people to have about it, but also just at its most simplest, I wanted it to be a book that I would want to read, really. Well, you wrote your first book,

am I right in thinking, in just four months while holding down a big, busy job. How different is the process of writing for you now? Because I imagine the novel took longer than four months. The novel took about six months Okay, it was still really quick Yeah, I mean the novel took about six months But I don't really know

Anyone who Has the luxury of much longer than that To be quite honest I mean, I think that Unless you're necessarily You know, a best-selling author And that's your main career Most of us are doing this alongside other things

And writing books doesn't really You know, I don't know In terms of like how much it allows you To just rely on that soul as your income so you kind of that's a good motivation right to like finish it relatively quickly but the first book I wrote in that four months

I didn't go out anywhere really beyond my actual day job and I didn't want to socialise with people so at that time being able to do that in four months was hard don't get me wrong but that was like willingly wanting to stay at home and

having a reason to not have to be around other people whereas this was very much a different set of circumstances where I started writing it, I really loved, I would say, three quarters of the process. The final quarter when, you know, I was sort of flouncing around in my dressing gown going to go, this is terrible, everyone's going to hate it, no one's going to believe that these characters are real. That was really difficult because the pressure that you have or that you put upon yourself for people to love the characters that you've created

can be immense, I think, depending on what your standards of perfectionism are. It's time to talk about your fifth book shelvey book today, which is Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Ruffie. On a quiet day near the Caribbean island of Black Conch, a mermaid raises her head from the sea, attracted by David, a fisherman waiting for a catch. The mermaid has been living in the vast ocean all alone for centuries. When she's caught and dragged ashore by American tourists, David rescues her with the aim of putting her back in the ocean. but it's soon clear that the mermaid is already transforming into a woman. What did you love about this book?

So I was a judge for the Costa Book Awards, and this was the book that we selected as the winner. And when it came through, I just could not put this book down. I remember thinking, I mean, aside from the fact that Monique Ruffy has the most incredible writing style, but the world that she creates is just phenomenal because very often I think when I've read books that touch upon magical realism in the past is that usually the rule of thumb

is that you don't show too much of the magical because then that, you know, you're sort of dragging that into reality and then it's very difficult to create a world that you then are looking very closely at if what you need to do is suspend your disbelief, right? Especially if it's magical realism versus like fantasy. So this is very much a book.

that's rooted in reality. But I think what surprised me about it was I knew the premise of it. I knew that this mermaid sort of comes on land and so on. But I didn't know that you would then see her love story with David play out and how her tale transforms and what happens to her and all of that like detail. And Monique manages to do this in a way that not for a minute do you think it's not real, you know. I think also the way that she blends in the mermaid's voice and how the mermaid talks about what it's been like to be alone for a thousand years.

I mean, the emotions that this book brings up in me is that you can feel that loneliness. You know, the premise is that she's been cursed by women who are jealous of her or who think that, you know, their husbands might be too attracted to her or whatever. And she's cursed into the body of a mermaid, you know, doomed to, swim the oceans and be on her own until you know she meets david but i think that that sense of loneliness it sounds completely ridiculous that i'm talking about the loneliness of a fictitious mermaid and you know relating to that but i can sense that within her and i can that resonates i think on a really deep level i think with monique the older i get the more i really gravitate towards

stories of women particularly older women for whom success has not been a linear path because I think it's really, really important to have those stories told. Because if you believe everything that you see on Instagram, you think that everyone's a Sunday Times bestseller, or you think that, you know, everyone's debut is phenomenally successful and so on. And that can create a really hard comparison point for yourself and how you achieve things. Monique's career, I mean, her second book, it came out in 2010. It was rejected by 27 publishers, and then it won the Orange,

prize for fiction. With Mermaida Black Conch, you know, it was rejected by almost every mainstream publisher and then People Tree Press picked it up like tiny, tiny indie publishing. Monique had to crowd fund for budget to try and market her book. And now her book is published in so many different countries. It won the award, the Costa Book Award. And the success that she's experiencing, like I want everything for her. I want her to enjoy the success because to me, it's a lot of It's astonishing that her writing is so good and it got rejected by as many publishers and as many people as it did

because the talent that she has to me is evident from the first page of this book, you know? And these awards can be exceptionally helpful because then it gives that platform to this artist, to this author who deserves it and can go on to create more and as you say, you're so invested in that now. And what was it like judging the Costa Book of the Year award?

And the award is sadly no longer an active prize. It was really difficult because basically there's no cap on the number of books that people can submit. So essentially as a judge, what you are probably having to do is to read, you know, I think I had about 70 books or something. And not all judges are, we're not all reading the same books, right? For a book, for example, we then get through that process, I think is acceptable. So even beyond like the book that wins, the shortlist as well is definitely worth paying attention to. But it was a really, I'm not going to lie, it was a really difficult process because also there is a part of me that's, that has been thinking about other books that maybe didn't get the chance that they were supposed to just because of the sheer volume of other books that were submitted. But when you're then able to select a winner, especially when you know what the prize is going to do for that book and you know that it's going to give it the chance that really.

it should have been given in the first place. That is an incredible feeling, you know, and to be able to help someone do that and give someone that opportunity to be able to do that, I think is very, very grateful for that. It is hard because no one book is necessarily better than another just because for this person reading it, it meant something more, it spoke to them, they felt seen.

And as you say, if the other judges aren't all reading the same as you for your initial submissions, it might just not have spoken to your experience, but it could be an amazing book and it feels such a shame to toss it aside, as it were. But then equally, when something really does speak to you, you have every right to put it on that pedestal. It deserves it, because that was what it was put in the world to do,

to speak to someone. And that sort of leads me to my next question, which is, can you please let me know which is your favourite of the five books you brought today? We've just been saying, oh, it's not fair to say one book is better than another, but I do need to know if you had to pick just one. Oh my gosh.

I mean, but it depends, does it not? On the... Yes, it does put in it. It does depend. And these are the technicalities. I'm faced with every episode. Okay. I am honestly very sorry.

Okay. If I have to pick, but I would like it to be known... You can caveat all of this. Okay. I'm caveatting this on the basis of time. So how long this book has been in my life? it would be God of small things. But every single one of those books is my favourite.

But fine, I'll choose that as my favourite. Very perforgingly. I'm sorry to make you do that. But you know what? The caveat is enough. I feel like people are going to know. Thank you. It's not a competition.

Honestly, this has been a very special experience for me. And for anyone listening, I think, who will have been touched by a lot of the things that you said. So thank you so much for taking the time. So I know you're super busy. Thank you so much for having me. 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.