Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep7: 2023 Shortlisted Author Special

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

In this very special bonus episode, Vick sits down with this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlisted authors, Jaqueline Crooks, Louise Kennedy, Barbara Kingsolver, Priscillla Morris, Maggie O’Farrell, and Laline Paull. The locations of their books span the globe, from Renaissance Italy and Northern Ireland during The Troubles, to opioid-infested Virginia and even an underwater world populated with extraordinary creatures, and we’ll be finding out more about these phenomenal books and why they deserve a spot on your bookshelf during the episode. The 2023 winner will be announced on Wednesday 14th June. The shortlist: **Fire Rush by Jaqueline Crooks **Trespasses by Louise Kennedy **Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver **Black Butterflies by Priscillla Morris **The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell **Pod by Laline Paull 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.

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 am 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. You've joined me for a very special bonus episode to celebrate this year's Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlisted Authors. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This year's 2023 shortlist has now been announced and what better way to discover these six spectacular books than by joining us for the Women's Prize Shortlist Book Club online. Wherever you are in the world, over three evenings in May, you can tune in to bestselling author Kate Moss,

this year's six shortlisted authors and a lineup of celebrated actors for a joyous celebration of women's writing. Featuring readings from the shortlisted novels, candid chat from the authors, and your chance to shape the conversation, this is the ultimate book club. Head to the Women's Prize website now to get your ticket.

In this episode, we'll be hearing from the six incredible authors who have been shortlisted for the prize this year. Jacqueline Crooks, Louise Kennedy, Barbara Kingsolver, Priscilla Morris, Maggie O'Farrell and Lillene Paul. The locations of their books span the globe, from Renaissance Italy and Northern Ireland during the Troubles to opioid-infested Virginia, and even an underwater world populated with extraordinary creatures.

And we'll be finding out more about these phenomenal books and why they deserve a spot on your bookshelf during the episode. The 2023 winner will be announced on Wednesday the 14th of June. Now we begin with Jacqueline Croix discussing fire rush, a novel set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of the 1980s, a mesmerising story of love, loss and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music. To give us a flavour of the book, here's an extract narrated by Leone Elliott. One o'clock in the morning, hot foot, all three of us, step in where we had no business. tombstone estate giles Caribbean

Irish No one expects better We ain't it But we sure ain't shit All we need is a little bit of rid him So we got Inait Deep into the dance hall crypt Come now

Asase calls Pushing her way down the stairs High Priestess glow Red Ancara cloth Wound round her hair Like a towering inferno Assase is the oldest. 25.

A year older than me and Ruma. Rumour is nothing like her red-haired Irish family. Magyall is dance-taught, tall with a rubber-ripped belly. Androgynous. Blonde. She dyes her hair obsidian black. Stuffs it underneath a knitted red, gold-green ruster cap. We squeeze past chirps in men,

stand in front of the arch-wooded door, suck in the last of the O-2. I follow a sassi inside. Mygyal follows the smoke. Beneath barrel-vaulted arches. Dance-all darkness. Pile-up bodies. Ganger clouds.

We lean against flesh-eating limestone walls near two coffin-sized speaker boxes that vibrate us into the underworld. Runnings. The scene goes the usual way, a rustle's rumour which is good because that's the only kind of man shall dance with, They're respectful. They're my brethren, she says. A sweet boy pulls a sassay.

Test in, test in. One, two, three. Lights go on for a few seconds. Only one type of man left for me. A tall, light-skinned man, face the colour of wet sand, stalked green eyes, standing in his silence. Man pulls me with not so much as a, what's up, want to dance. Nothing. Jacqueline, first of all, massive, massive congratulations on being shortlisted. Thank you so much. I'm so excited. For anyone who is uninitiated currently, can you give us a bit of a flavor of what your book Fire Rush is all about? So Fire Rush takes us back into 1970s, the South Black Sound Revolution and the underground dub reggae scene that was established. by Caribbean migrants, many Jamaican migrants,

who were creating these sites of living and socialising hidden sites because they weren't accepted by mainstream society. And so they created underground venues, dances to meet in safety. And the music that came out of that was dub reggae, which is a kind of really powerful sound. And it's about women in that underground scene, really trying to fight for their survival, fight for their space in a male-dominated scene. What inspired you to write, Fire Rush, what inspired you to depict this dub reggae underground scene and the women at the heart of it?

So I grew up, I was like a 15-year-old going to those dances, subterranean dances, when I should have been at home. I don't know where I was going, you know, way out of my depth. So I grew up in that scene. was in it for like 10, 15 years. And it's the memory of that sound, that very powerful echoing, dub chambery sound that takes you, plays with time,

it transport you to different places and times. It was such a powerful sound, and it's always stayed with me. But looking back on that time, I realised it was a lost world because it was underground. Not many people knew it was taking place because it happened 12 o'clock at night until dawn.

It was a hidden world, although albeit it was so loud, so that the movement, that culture, the fashion, the language of the time and the music itself, it was largely hidden. So I thought I almost wanted to recreate a lost world and my time within it. Creating that world and creating an underground music scene, you know, in writing is no mean feat. You know, the way the story's told, it's very rhythmic. The music is so central to the plot of the book.

But it also seems to be embedded within the language itself. How do you inject that into your writing? I knew that in talking, in writing about this important seminal part of black history, I had to get the language right. We're talking about a revolution, a big revolution. And I thought, I can't tell this story in standard English because it's all about music. So I had to bring a musicality into the language. I was trying to get dub reg it onto the page.

I love this. I think by using a mix of Jamaican patwa, which is very, rhythmic and very kind of revolutionary in its tone and phrasing and the sound effects of da reggae, you know, echoplex scream, rimshot, thunder and things like that, to give the language new meaning and to write in an alternative language that's quite experimental, that was the challenge I set myself, but it felt important to do that. A lot of writers say they can't write to music, especially not music with lyrics because it sort of gets in the way, but this is a completely different endeavour. Do you write to music? I absolutely did. So the first two drafts, I was just

busting out dub reggae tracks, re-engaging. So I hadn't listened to dub reggae since I left the scene, you know, some 20, 30 years ago. So I was re-engaging with the music and I played it constantly while I was writing to remind myself of the rhythm and to take that, the writing, into another sphere almost, and another rhythm. You should release, like, the audio book alongside a playlist for the listeners. There is a playlist. I, you know, that there is a playlist for the book. So each chapter has got a track that kind of tells a story a little bit. I love this. Well, both Fire Rush and your short story collection as well, something was there. Both give voice to previously voiceless characters, especially young women of colour. Is this something that motivates you in your writing?

Absolutely. I mean, I work in the community sector, working with excluded communities who don't have a And so having a voice is definitely something that preoccupies me in my professional work and in my writing. I'm fascinated by how we as writers bring in characters who are voiceless or have no power, just empowered in some way, and how through creative writing we can give them an alternative voice through their silence, maybe through the way they dance, their interactions, or just their silence. So it's something that I'm really passionate about bringing the lives of, black women especially. I think, you know, in the dub reggae scene, men have a voice. They're prominent. We know they're the DJs and the toasters, but the women were invisible. We don't,

our role in that scene is unacknowledged. We were the dancers. We were set in the fashion scene. So we played a significant role. And so it is important for me to bring out the undervalued roles of women through writing. Well, this has made me really want this Saturday night to go to do I'm down, underground night, midnight, I'm down. But for everyone listening, I hope this has encouraged them

to pick up fire rush because it is absolutely exquisite. Congratulations once again on being shortlisted for the Women Prize for Fiction and I'm looking forward to seeing you when we have the ceremony in June. Pleasure talking to you.

Thank you so much. Next, we speak with Louise Kennedy with her book, trespasses, which is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

And here's a sample of the book, read by Brid Brennan. Kussela wrapped her handbag in her coat and pushed it into the gap between the beer fridge and the till. Her brother, Eamon, was bent over the counter with a stock list. He looked up at her and his eyes narrowed. He inclined his head at the mirror that ran the length of the bar. Kuselah leaned in to check her reflection. Father Slattery had marked her with a thick cross an inch wide and two inches long.

The rub of her finger raised the piney, resinous scent of whatever blessed ungent the ashes were mixed with and blurred the cruciate shape to a sooty smudge. Amon slapped a wet serviette into her hand. Hurry up, he hissed. Most of the men who drank in the pub did not get ashes on Ash Wednesday, or do the stations of the cross on Good Friday or go to Mass on Sunday. It was one thing to drink in a Catholic-owned bar, quite another to have your pint pulled by a woman smeared in papish war paint. Cushla buffed until the skin on her forehead was pink. The serviette blackened, flittered. She tossed it in the bin.

Eamon muttered something under his breath. The only word she could make out was Eidget. The regulars were lined along the counter. Jimmy O'Kane, the single egg he bought for his tea bulging in his breast pocket. Minty, the school caretaker, who got through so much Carlsberg special brew, the pub won an award for having the highest sales in Northern Ireland, even though he was the only customer who drank the stuff. Louise, it's an absolute pleasure to get to chat to you. And first of all, just congratulations on being shortlisted.

Thank you very much. I can't believe it. I still can't believe it was actually. Mads altogether. What was it like when you got the news? How did you feel? I couldn't get over it. I mean, I didn't, I don't know. It's sort of funny because I think I've always like watched the long list and short list for the women price since I started writing a few years ago. And so it's not like that I ever sort of had my eye on the prize.

I was just always very curious about that prize in particular. And, you know, some of my favorite books from the last few years have, you know, have appeared on the short list. So, yeah, I mean, I didn't expect to be all. on the long list and I thought, well, that's it now. And then when I heard I was on the short list, yeah, I couldn't get over it. It's amazing. Well, can you give our listeners who haven't yet read trespasses? A little summary of what it's about.

Yeah. So trespasses is a love story that's set in the north of Ireland in a small town on the shores of Belfast Lock in 1975. It's about a young Catholic teacher called Cush and Leverie, who by day teaches a class of seven or eight-year-old children. she's a primary school teacher and by night she helps out sometimes in the pubs that our family has in the town

and it's there that she meets a man called Michael Agnew and I guess the book opens when she's a bit late, rooms into work and you know the regulars who drink in the pub are lined along the counter and I mean they're a fairly rum lot when Michael Agnew walks in the door he's very noticeable for lots of reasons

and they fairly quickly begin a relationship which is a bad idea for lots of reasons. He is Protestant to her Catholic. He's a lot older than her and he's married. It's the Holy Trinity, isn't it? It is. Bad ideas. Very bad ideas, all right.

What inspired you to write trespasses? So trespasses is really, it's a work of fiction. I mean, Michael and Kushner and then also Davey McGeown, who is a little boy who Kushner teaches who she becomes very close to. are completely from my imagination, but the world of the book is the world that I grew up in. So my family had a bar in a small town on the shores of Belfast Lock in the 1970s, and I turned eight in 1975,

so I could have been one of Cusha's pupils. So I guess the kind of everyday life of living during the time that, you know, is known as the troubles, really probably reflects my own childhood. Yeah, I was going to say, because you were younger than Kushner is in the level, but her world does, you know, it mirrors your own upbringing during the triples, which sort of aspects of your upbringing of being a child did you, did you sort of sprinkle in there? I suppose. So when Kushner is teaching in her school, the children begin every day with the news, which I guess is some sort of like really, very intense form of show and tell. It's on the same principle. So every day the children are. are, they come in, because it's a small Catholic school, every day begins with a prayer.

The kids will mumble a Hail Mary very quickly to get it over with. And then they compete to report the previous day's news in their own words. And it is really quite a competitive endeavor. I think the opening kind of mention of the news in the classroom, Davy, one of the little boys. you know, just briefly says there was a bomb in Belfast and another child is outraged and correct them and gives a lot of detail about the fact that it wasn't in Belfast

and the type of explosives that were used of what paramilitary organisation carried it out. So, you know, it was really very much like that. I suppose in other ways as well, the demographic of the town that Cusha lives in really reflects the place that we lived in. So we didn't live in a place. I mean, I suppose what happened was that when the trouble started,

people tended to retreat where possible into their own communities, but for other people that wasn't possible. So we lived in a town which was around 90% Protestant to 10% Catholic. We belong to this very small Catholic community. And really our, I suppose our living in the town was conditional on being very quiet about our identity and not being overtly Irish. my family would have identified as Irish rather than British, but that certainly was never anything that, you know,

that anybody felt that they could say loud. So I suppose a lot of that, a lot of that silence and fear, I guess, and a feeling of being out of place is something that probably fits, you know, very well with how Cusha's life is and how she feels about the world that she's in as well. at the heart of trespasses is this incredibly believable love story. It is both tender and erotic. How did you approach this aspect of the novel? That was difficult, I have to say.

So I think the reason I went really with the first draft, I didn't have a publisher. So that meant that nobody ever had to see it. And maybe because of my own personal circumstances, at the time of writing. I had made a few notes for a novel and made a couple of playlists of music from the 70s and was looking at ridiculous videos on YouTube

about what Belfast was like in those years. But I hadn't really written very much. And then in March 2019, I had a diagnosis for melanoma. And I had some surgery. And I was at home for maybe around three days taking really strong painkillers. And I'm sitting in an armchair watching back-to-back

episodes of Call My Agent on Netflix. I think I watched all three series in as many days. And then after a few days of that, I just thought, okay, so get off the tablets because they were making me feel really spacey and start taking parisina well instead. Stop watching TV and then I suppose I needed a project.

So I made myself a sling because I had a wound on my back and under my arm and made a deal with myself that I try to write a thousand words a day that I would forgive myself for being flaky sometimes in view of the fact that I wasn't very well. and that I'd write forward every day and not look back ever at the mess

that I had written the previous day or all the other days before that because I think if I had actually look back I wouldn't have been able to go on and would be so horrified. Well yeah, I mean I guess that's pretty much how I did it. And then here we are.

Best of luck for the awards in June and thank you so much for speaking to us today. Thank you so much. Bailey's 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. You're listening to a special episode of the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, where we're speaking to this year's spectacular shortlisted authors. Next up is Barbara Kingsolver, previous winner of the Women's Prize back in 2010 with the Lacuna, and now author of 2023 shortlisted novel Demon Copperhead, a reimagining of Dickens's David Copperfield set in poverty-stricken Virginia at the height of the opioid crisis. And here's the opening of the book, narrated by Charlie Thurston.

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much. the worst of the job was up to me. My mother being, let's just say, out of it. On any other day, they'd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home. Good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she'd be,

little bleach blonde smoking her palm-alls hanging on that railing like she's captain of her ship up there. And now it might be the hour it's going down. This is an 18-year-old girl we're discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggett to go bang on the door, barge inside and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile. Worming and shoving around because I'm still inside the sack that babies float in.

Pre-real life. Mr. Peggett was outside idle in his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he'd spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him that Jesus ink could hold on a minute. First she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggett being a lady that doesn't beat around the bushes, and if need be, we'll tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. Barbara, congratulations on being shortlisted for the women's fries this year. Can you give our listeners just a flavor of what Demon Copperhead is all about?

It's a story of the lost boys. The kids in the place where I live who have been really left behind. I live in Appalachia. It's the poorest part of the United States of America. It's hill country that live, that sort of runs through, it's not the same as the south. It's a mountain range that runs through a whole bunch of states, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, where I live, Kentucky, West Virginia. And it's a region of the U.S. that has really been treated like an internal colony of the U.S. So everything about this region where I live has been exploited, really, by external capital.

Companies that have come in to take first the timber, the coal, tobacco. Every industry that has come into this region has taken stuff out and left a mess behind. And the latest, the sort of the most recent in this coal train of exploitations has been the open. opioid epidemic. We were seen as a population that could be, the pharmaceutical companies could exploit to sell a whole lot of painkillers, which ended up getting a lot of people addicted. So we have a generation of kids here where I live who have been orphaned, essentially orphaned, whose parents are incarcerated or addicted or dead because of the opioid epidemic. I think the rest of the world has heard this story in terms of the big players, you know,

people recognize Purdue Pharmaceutical, the Sacklers, you know, the big story has been told. I wanted to tell the story of the little people, literally the kids. So my narrator, my main character is a kid whose nickname is Demon, Demon Copperhead. and he's sort of a modern day David Copperfield. I modeled this story on Dickens' David Copperfield because I thought he had it right. This is a story, if this is a story that people don't really want to hear, you just give them a crackerjack plot and really good characters,

and you make them listen. And so I took a page from that book, actually, took a whole lot of pages from that book. Why did you want to use Charles Dickens' David Copperfield as that basis? Because it worked. It worked for Dickens. I mean, Dickens was, I would say he was, he was kind of the mini-series writer of his era. His novels were serialized. As you know, he wrote them, he wrote these short chapters and released them, you know, week by week. and people were standing at the docks waiting for the ship to come in and unload the latest

episode of these stories. He, you know, I mean, I spent, I spent about three years trying to crack this. I knew I wanted to, I wanted to write about, about where I live in the opioid epidemic and sort of the bigger picture of what has been done to us. And I also knew, nobody wants to hear that story or nobody really thinks they want to hear that story. People have a lot of preconceived ideas about Akalachians, about hillbillies, you know, about poor people, about addicted people. How do I run up against those preconceptions of what's going on? And I just listened to Charles Dickens. He said, you make it a good enough story and they'll follow you. They'll follow you into into any dark place. But it's not just story, it's characters, it's, it's wit,

it's sort of, it's plot, uh, plot construction, you know, the way Dickens uses coincidence and surprise and humor. All of those things really spoke to me. I thought that's, that's the way to do this. And so that's what I did. the novel being set, where you're from in Appalachia, and the way that people have been negatively represented over the years, or neglected or taken from, like you just said, was some of the fuel behind this book outrage? Of course. Of course.

I live among really angry people. You can see it in US politics. Rural people is not just Appalachians. I mean, we feel pretty personally that we are, you know, we feel the condescension of the rest of the country and the world in the way they talk about hillbillies and, you know, sort of backward ignorant people. But it's rural, rural people all across America. And it's interesting that since this book has been published, I've heard from so many people who say, I hear you. I feel this. I live in the Ozarks of, of, you know, of Arkansas or I live on a ranch in Montana. It's, it's been, it's really come home to me since the publication of this book that it's really,

it's an antipathy toward rural people altogether, not just us, hillbillies. It's rural people who don't live in cities, rural people are nearly half of the population of this country. and we might be like one or two percent of what we get to see and hear and read about. Redressing that representation is powerful and important and literary fiction can do that. It's a tool. It's a weapon. But you've also tackled an enormous topic in the opioid crisis. What can fiction do in the world? What is the scope of, of its power when tackling something like this. Well, fiction can do, it can do anything.

It can go anywhere. But what it can do best and most amazingly well is put you, the reader, inside the brain and inside the life of another human being. When you read a novel, you set your own life down on the bedside table and you pick up another life and you go in there. And you see through the eyes of a character. their children are your children. You know, their worries are your worries.

So it creates empathy. And I think that's such an incredible tool for the purposes that I've just expressed to try to get people to understand what it's like for us, those of us who live in, you know, what's called flyover country, what's called the middle of nowhere. This is not the middle of nowhere. For us, this is our everywhere. It's an empathy we could all do with,

every single person on this planet and now more than ever. You've been in this position before, talking of being in these positions, of being on this shortlist before, of winning the Women's Prize back in 2010 with your novel, The Lacuna, just casting your mind back. Can you remember what that felt like?

It's wonderful to be recognized. I mean, I don't think, When I'm, I'm sitting right now at my desk. This is my hands are on my keyboard. This is where I write. What you see behind me is, you know, my, these are my teachers. These are my friends. I spend a lot of time alone in a room. That's, most novelists are, you know, pretty introverted people because we live in our heads and we're really happy there. We're the company that we're most comfortable. comfortable with as, you know, our imaginary people that talk to us. So it's quite amazing to spend so much time in this, you know, extreme isolation, in this, in the quiet of this room, to go from here out into the world, not just, you know, like the nearest city that's a couple of hours from here, but to London, you know, to another country, to another world.

and see, I mean, just viscerally, you know, feel and see the impact that you work, that these people in your brain are happy on real people out there in the world. It's amazing. It's shocking. It's not easy. It's, you know, it's sort of like being thrown into the deep end of the pool. But it's also really, really gratifying. and it's something important for me to bring back here to this quiet room,

to remember that that's what I'm doing this for. It's not for me. It's for the world. And once those books are in the hands of others, they become theirs. You know, it was creating that room I can see right now, but it's spread so far away. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. It's been lovely to speak to you.

Thank you. Next, we spoke with Priscilla Morris, author of Black Butterflies. Inspired by real-life accounts of the longest siege in modern warfare only 30 years ago, this debut novel is a breathtaking portrait of disintegration, resilience and hope. And here's the opening of the book, narrated by Jan Kramer. Spring. It sometimes seemed to Zora that, with all the teaching and curating and meetings and paperwork, and caring and cooking and cleaning and errands,

she is floundering at the midpoint of her life. There's no time left over for the core of her. Perhaps at 55 she's beyond the midpoint now, but she'd always imagine that these years, her child grown and gone, herself not yet old, would be her most spacious and productive. She'd pictured herself spending long, blissful, days in her studio, but instead everything else always encroaches. There's the forward rhythm of the

tram and the rattle of the dusty windowpaints, the worry. She presses her forehead to the glass, drinking in her city at this strange hour. The wind carries twisting flyers down the street and the mountains waver in the pre-dawn light. The outlines of things, buildings, frozen cars, a sleeping drunk, a porous. The threshold between night and day feels uncertain, as if she could just as easily slip back into the night as go forwards into the day. Her husband, the sole other passenger, keeps his eyes closed and grips the handrail. His head droops, long spine curving.

She could hardly stir him from bed. It's the weekend, and she'd hoped to spend her day in the studio. But the terse 5am phone call would have stopped to that. There's been a break-in, her mother's neighbour informed her. Criminals, hooligans, God knows what, dancing and drinking all night, whooping and shouting, the police don't want to know. Priscilla, congratulations on being shortlisted. What does that mean to you?

It means the world. And getting a nomination for the Women's Prize was just kind of beyond my wildest dreams and so exciting. And it made me think of when I was little, the Orange Prize, as it was called then, just instantly knowing that that was the mark of a good book and a book I wanted to read. So many books have been winners of the Women's Prize. It's very exciting. Yeah. I remember when I was younger, going to the bookshop, clutching.

the Women's Prize for Fiction long list and shortlist and just thinking, okay, well, this is my reading list for the year. I'm so excited. I know they're going to be good. Exactly. Exactly. It's that sort of stamp of approval. You know this is going to be a fantastic book that you're going to love. And so many of the past winners are up there amongst my favourite books. It's a brilliant platform on which to put these books to ensure that they reach as many people as possible. Well, let's talk about black butterflies. Can you summarize your beautiful book for our listeners?

It's about what happens to your life when events, political, national, society events beyond your control, disrupt your everyday life. And in this case, it's set in the 1990s in Sarajevo during the war of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. And it follows the story of Zora, an artist and teacher. He's at the midpoint of her life and how she responds to the siege. She sends her family away to safety in England, not realizing, of course, that full-blown war was around the corner. And before she knows it, she's trapped in her city, surrounded by people in the hills, shelling the city, the power supplies, food, water, cut off one by one. and it's the first 10 months of the siege of Sarajevo through an artist's eyes. What inspired you to tell this story?

Well, I was inspired quite a while ago, maybe 25 years ago, when at my grandfather's funeral, I should say my mother is from Sarajevo, but she left when she was 19, so long before the war. But my grandparents and most of my mother's relatives were stuck in Sarajevo during the war. and at my grandfather's funeral in the Serbian Orthodox Church in Notting Hill, I overheard the story of my great uncle and met my great uncle for the first time, who was an artist, whose life's work was destroyed during the siege. And yet he escaped at a very old age and he came to England and he started painting again. And it was this sort of story of resilience and of art overcoming the tragedy.

of war that just wormed its way into my head and stuck with me and grew, blossomed many years later into black butterflies. Yeah. So, you know, your decision to foreground art and creativity in a story about war and destruction, it dates back. Is that why your protagonist, Zora, is an artist? Yes. Yeah. So I just loved this combination of art, war. And the there's a key fire in it. I think it was a combination of these three things that just sparked in me, the desire to write black butterflies. And I wanted to show that despite being reduced to the lowest level of human existence,

they had nothing, very little food, no electricity, no heating, and windows of minus 20. They couldn't leave, of course, the city. And if they went out onto the streets, they risked being shot at by snipers. despite all this, there is the need to go on to connect to other people through friendship, love and art, through making art. So Zora is a very resilient woman and she goes obviously through her ups and downs, but she continues to make art despite great loss. And it's this contrast, this desire to continue connecting through art despite everything. being shattered around you that really inspired Black Butterflies.

But it sounds like this story has been inside you for a long time, these themes and caring about these topics and wanting to tell the story. But did you always want to write? When was that decision made? Yes, absolutely. I've wanted to write since I was six. So basically since I was first read stories, and I think it was stories of Roldahl in particular,

that just entering that amazing world of the imagination gave me such pleasure that I just thought, that's it. That's what I want to do when I'm older is to be the voice in someone's head that is giving this pleasure in creating those worlds. So it was a very early desire and in fact the first thing I saved up for when I was six was a plastic typewriter,

no red typewriter. And so I've written, this is my debut novel, of course, but I've written short stories and I've worked on other forms of writing for many years before. Well, it's funny we started off our chat by saying that when we were young, we would look at that list,

that short list for the women's prize and those books became our reading lists and those stories would enter our heads, those voices would enter our heads to know that now your story is going to do that for so many others. That must feel pretty full circle. It's fantastic.

So much resell. and so many people went into helping me write black butterflies. I went and lived in Sarajevo for five months and spoke to people about their experiences of the siege and, you know, it took a while for them to open up, as you might expect, because it's very harrowing stuff and you don't necessarily want to remember it. But when they did eventually open up to me after, in some cases, months of friendship and hanging out together,

they spoke like for four or five hours at a stretch and it just all came out in one flooding go, their experience of the siege. Similarly with my great-uncle and great-heart and other family members who were now, or who were now, because he's now passed away in England. All these people have shared so much and opened so much to me that part of me feels a responsibility and I want the resulting novel Black Butterflies to be read and heard by as many people as possible. Next, we speak to Maggie O'Farrell. Also a previous winner of the Women's Prize with Hamnet, her novel about Shakespeare's son,

which won in 2019. With her 23 shortlisted novel, The Marriage Portrait, she again takes us back in history, but this time to Renaissance Italy, to tell the little-known story of Lucrezia, a daughter of Cosimo de Medici, who, aged 16, is married to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. And this proximity to power puts her in mortal danger. And let's be transported there now with an extract narrated by Genevieve Gaunt. Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fur.

Her husband is sitting down, not in his customary place, at the opposite end, but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder should she wish. He is unfolding his napkin and straight, a knife and moving the candle towards them both when it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her. She is 16 years old, not quite a year into her marriage.

They have travelled for most of the day, using what little daylight the season offers, leaving Ferrara at dawn, and riding out to what he had told her was a hunting lodge, far in the northwest of the province. But this is no hunting lodge, is what Lucrezia had wanted to say when they reached their destination, a high-walled edifice of dark stone, flanked on one side by dense forest

and on the other by a twisting meander of the Po River. She would have liked to turn in her saddle and ask, Why have you brought me here? She said nothing, however, allowing her mare to follow him along the path through dripping trees, over the arch-backed bridge, and into the courtyard of the strange, fortified, star-shaped building, which seemed even then,

to strike her as peculiarly empty of people. The horses have been led away. She has removed her sodden cloak and hat, and he has watched her do this standing with his back to the blaze in the grate. And now, he is gesturing to the country servants in the hall's outer shadows to step forward and place food on their plates, to slice the bread to pour wine into their cups. And she is suddenly recalling the words of her sister-in-law

delivered in a hoarse whisper, You will be blamed. Maggie is lovely to see you again. Oh, it's really nice to be here, lovely to see you, Vic. Well, we have chatted before on the podcast. You brought your book, Shelfly Books, but now we're just going to talk about your book. Congratulations on the marriage portrait being shortlisted

for the women's prize. Thank you so much. It's so nice. So nice to be back. Oh, honestly, I loved it. I was just transported by it. Can you summarize what marriage portrait is about for our listeners? Yes, it's about a real life Renaissance teenage Duchess who is Maradoth to a man she barely knows. And she realizes quite soon that he is planning to murder her and she has to, she has to try and think how to get out of her situation, how to get out of her very, very narrow destiny. What inspired you to write Lucrezia's story?

Where did this come from? Well, I have to say I came to it initially via the poem, my last Duchess, which is by Browning, a very famous poem. I think quite a lot of students of school and university study that poem in this country anyway. and I have always really loved it. It's such a sinister and very slowly powerful poem. You know, I still remember really clearly the first time I ever read it.

I was at university and I read the line where it says, so I should say it features a duke, an Italian duke talking about his previous wife and he pulls back a curtain and he shows this beautiful portrait of her. And he says, oh, by the way, I murdered her. And I still remember the line where it says, and all smiles stop together, full stop. And I remember this kind of moment of horror thinking, oh my God, that moment where I thought that means he killed her.

And I was just, you know, I read his, Broard Browning's dramatic monologues quite often actually, particularly when I'm between books. And after I finished Hamlet, I couldn't decide what to write next. So I was reading those poems among other things. And I just was wondering to myself one day, whether or not Robert Browning based that poem on real people, whether it was based on real events.

And I looked it up. And within a few minutes, I had her name, the Cretia Domenici, and the really shocking information that she'd be only 16 when she died. And then a few minutes after that, her portrait, which is by Brumzino, was downloading very slowly on my very rubbish old phone. And it was extraordinary because I think most novels,

or most ideas for novels creep up on your very, very, slowly, all they do with me. They have a kind of long gestational period. But the marriage portrait was the exception to that rule, because it just arrived like a kind of bolt of lightning. Because as soon as I saw this portrait of her, I just knew that I was looking at the subject in my next book. I knew that I would write a novel about her.

I wanted to write this story that she herself might have told, were she able? Well, you pick out female figures from history, which we know little about less than we should. Of course, Shakespeare's wife, Agnes Hathaway, Lucrezia, the third daughter of Cosimo de Medici. How do you weave together such real seeming, such full characters from these tiny bits of recorded history, from a painting? Well, I think in a way, I think what interests me, actually, if I'm thinking about stories about the past, are the people whose lives are written in water, in the people whose histories are not so well known. And I think it's not a particular coincidence

that it's certainly my last two books those people are tending to be women. But I think, I don't know. I mean, I think in a sense there's actually very little known about Lucrezia. I suppose she has that in common actually with Shakespeare's wife, Anne or Agnes Hathaway, that they are a bit of a void. I mean, Lucrezia obviously was born into one of the most famous dynasties, known of the Italian Renaissance, but at the same time,

she herself seems to have kind of fallen beneath the radar a little. Her parents, Eleanor de Toledo and Cosimo de Medici, really adored each other, even though they had a sort of pretty much an arranged marriage, and they wrote to each other a lot when they were apart. And in their letters, quite a few of Lucretia's, many, many siblings get mentions, but Lucretia doesn't really warrant that many mentions at all.

I just got the sense of her reading some of their letters that she was a bit over. looked and a bit underloved. But in a sense, I think that kind of void in a way, sort of void of facts or biography would be difficult for a historian, but actually for a novelist, it's an opportunity because you get to step forward and fill those voids or fill those gaps with whatever story you yourself want to tell. And it's such a sumptuous world that you evoke. What research did you do to enable you to write about Renaissance? It's a so convincingly, so beautifully.

Well, I mean, you know, it obviously it's a subject and a time that there are an awful lot of books about visual references as well. So I spent, I mean, this book for me was completely bookended by lockdown by the pandemic. And I was writing it in between like all the rest of us. You know, I was stuck in the house like all of us. And I had three kids to homeschool and to look after and, you know, a kind of pandemic to steer through. So I found that actually spending an hour or two a day in Renaissance Florence and Renaissance Ferrara was actually a very good way for me to stay sane because obviously there are

worst places to armchair. Oh yeah. So quite a lot of the research was book-based because obviously there's a lot about that and I spent a really long time looking at a lot of Renaissance paintings. But the really strange and what the thing that worried me actually is that I felt that I was doing it counterintuitively because obviously if the world, world in spring 2020 had been working normally. I would have gone probably quite soon off to Italy and done some kind of footwork. But obviously, it doesn't need to be said

that none of us were going anywhere. And so I did a lot of kind of research. I did, you know, I used the computer, the internet. I looked at photographs and aerial maps. And I did used to live near Florence for a while. So I knew Florence quite well. And I'd been to the Lekio, which was, but only as a tourist in a long time ago. But I'd never set foot in Ferrara. So I was really worried about that because I have a very strict rule that I would never, I would never write about somewhere I'd never been. So I was quite worried about that. But, you know, I mean, like everything else that we in the pandemic,

we all just kind of made it up as we went along. I am actually interested. I know that the, I know that Hamlet has been adapted for stage by the RSC and Stratford-on-Aven. What's it been like seeing that process? And then it's soon to be moving to the West End as well. Yeah. It's been amazing. I mean, I, so someone asked me if I had hesitated when the Royal Shakespeare Company phoned up and said,

can we make a day of your book? But I said, no, you know, that's not really. You don't have to think, should I, you know, do they know anything about Shakespeare? So, no, it was, it was amazing and it's an amazing experience. And I was quite, one way it feels quite strange, because you do have to surrender your work. to other people, but I knew it was in such brilliant and, say, with Erica Wyman, the director and Lolita Chakrabati, the adapter. And I knew also, I think you have to go into it knowing that the play is going to be different

than the novel, of course, you know, it's a completely different art form. And it will sit alongside a novel rather than be exactly the same, you know, because Lolita has done different things with it. She's had to, she did an amazing job of disassembling it, because obviously Hamlet wasn't chronological in any sense of disassembled it. and made it into a chronological narrative. So it was absolutely fascinating. And it's extraordinary sitting in a theatre

and seeing these fantastic actors to speak the lines that you wrote in your bedroom five years previously. It's very, very surreal. It's like somebody is suddenly looking inside your head. So it was fantastic. It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime. Thank you so much, Maggie. And best of luck for the awards.

Thank you so much, Big. It's lovely to see you again. Finally, Laleen Paul joins us to discuss her immersive and transformative new novel of an ocean world and its extraordinary creatures. Pod explores the true meaning of family, belonging, sacrifice, the harmony and tragedy of the pod within an ocean that is no longer the sanctuary it once was, and which reflects a world all too recognisable to our own. And now to submerge ourselves in that underwater world with an extract, Read by Finty Williams. Half dreaming at the surface, Aya wakes in an instant. Her reflex is always on high alert,

but it is only a wild and lusty chase. The young couple leap, splash back down and then, twirling in their bubbles, join together belly to belly. Aya admires their dance. Some things never change. Others do. Within three generations, this pause, has racially blended into a new tribe that mixes spinner grace with bottlenose strength.

Like all the old, Aya finds the young more beautiful every day. But she would not go back. Time goes so fast now anyway, calves barely weaned and now mating, dusks and dawns racing each other, as if the whole ocean has accelerated to a new rhythm. She does not mind, because it means reunion comes to. closer, with the ocean, and with one whose heart still beats in hers. Since the seasons blurred, the moons lost their meaning, and it is not for her to dictate the spawning of fish or coral.

It is odd, at this time of her life, to miss the rituals she so resisted when she was young. Perhaps none of this would have happened if she had not. Everything broke apart. But Aya no longer blames herself. What happened was bigger than any fault of hers. Aya watches the amorous young couple, now drawing an excited throng. If she and her dwindling cohort of elders find the younger generations shallow and lacking in curiosity, they keep it to themselves. They avoid nostalgia, and unless some rare youngster makes reference to it, they even forget they are of different races. Aya is the last spinner dolphin of the remote and peaceful Longhi tribe.

Lelling, congratulations. What brilliant news on being shortlisted. It really is. It's a massive honour. And the reach of the women's prize is just incredible. I mean, it truly is global. And my book probably would not have reached the readers. It's now reading. So, yeah, it's fantastic. and thank you women's prize.

Oh, well, that's what it's all about, isn't it? It's about uplifting those voices that perhaps wouldn't have been heard otherwise, but really, really need to. This prize is incredibly impactful. What does it mean to you to be on the short list? Well, it's an incredible honour. And also, I think for any writer whose book gets noticed, you feel like, oh my God, I put my heart and soul into something.

And maybe it has a big splash at the beginning, maybe it doesn't. And if it doesn't, to be listed for a prize means you think, oh my God, it mattered, it matters, it was worth it. And, you know, a little glint has been seen amidst the sea of everything else competing for attention. So it's, and then you connect with readers. And what is the book if it isn't read? You know, it's a photograph without a viewer. It's a song that doesn't get listened to. The reader completes the book.

So there is this very real sense of completion and gratitude and satisfaction for a writer to have readers. And that's what the Women's Prize does. It brings readers to writers in a really heartfelt way. You mentioned there a sea of readers. Your shortlisted book, Pod is very unique. Can you summarise it for us? So the story of Pod, I describe it as a citation migration epic, Cetation, B, whales and dolphins and it's about the migration crisis that's happening in our oceans now.

It's science-backed, so I took the truth as the spine of my story. And the tribes of peoples in it are tribes of dolphins, tribes of different species of marine creatures. And I take them very seriously, and it's about how all these tribes and peoples interact in a world in crisis. in crisis. What inspired you to write it? I think it was writing my first novel, The Bees, which then made me much more forcibly aware of the climate crisis. And that led me to look at the Arctic, which led me to write my second novel, The Ice. And I found out about wailing. And I thought, no, I'm never going there. It's too painful and upsetting. And then on a holiday in Mauritius, I did an ill-advised swim with the wild dolphins trip

and realised what an idiot I was and found out about the dolphins and how they, one species had dislodged another species. So bottlenose dolphins dislodged a tiny pot of spinner dolphins in this bay. And the bottleneos themselves have been dislodged by an oil spill up the coast, which was not widely reported, but very real.

And I thought, wow, that's just like one group of people. or being dislodged by war and being forced to find a home somewhere else. I had no intention of writing a book about it. It was far too difficult, I thought. But I started researching the difference between bottleneosed dolphins and spinner dolphins. And they're both dolphins, but culturally they're different, physically they're different. And the more I found out, the more fascinated I got. And the more this great big kind of articulated lorry saying,

this book parked in front of my creative imagination until I couldn't really think about doing anything else I had to write on. Talk to me a little bit more about that scientific research, about the creatures that you write about, this underwater world, because you write so convincingly, and as you said, it's based in fact. What shape did that research take? I get asked a lot about how I can make non-human creatures empathetic to a human reader and it's all about research. When you start to understand anything deeply, you start to identify with them. And, you know, all forms of storytelling are about empathy and imagination and using, you know, we are selfish creatures. So we think, how would I feel in that situation?

And that's all I do. I research the organisms. So I research dolphins in this case. How do they live, what sort of societies do they live in? And that itself is so exciting and interesting, because, for instance, bottlenose dolphins are patriarchal and have political hierarchies, and they have what scientists call fission fusion groups, which to me look like political alliances with elections of the males and bottlenose dolphins will hold harooms of females, whereas spinner dolphins are matriarchal, they're smaller, they seem to me more joyful and they have this crazy habit of spinning that scientists don't yet understand the reason for and it's very elaborate. And when I found out about this I thought, well, it's an art form. It's their storytelling,

it's choreography, it's joy, it's thought, it's thought, it's erotic, it's playful, it's dance. So it was very easy to think, well, one people are happy and believe in equality and they focus on the beautiful things in life, but they also shut out the pain. They don't want to know. They're in their little place of privilege. Maybe they're one percenters of the ocean who have it all, but they don't want to know. And the bottleneurs have to live in deprived, degraded conditions where they can't hear properly. So they have to speak louder. and they're in pain, so what do they want?

They want entertainment and to block things out, and I thought I can relate to that as well. Pod is also a book about language. The dolphins, of course, communicate via clicks, but they also share an ancient language with whales. Tell us about the significance behind your choices in the language the characters used to communicate. That's really great that you've picked up on that book.

I'm really happy to hear that. I remember, I lived in America for a while, and this was thousands of years ago before there were mobile phones. And I came back to England when mobile phones were just starting. And I remember walking down the street in Soho and seeing people, you know, holding this thing and everyone suddenly talking. And I thought, I looked around, I thought, everyone's talking to someone. This is new. And I thought, are people really lonely before? Are people really anxious? Do we need to be permanently connected all the time?

So the idea that the bottle nose are always speaking comes from that. And the contraction of language that the digital world has brought to us as well. I feel really old-fashioned because I never write congrats or this arvoe because I feel or X-mas. And it probably makes me sound really fusty, but I feel like, no, these extra letters aren't going to cost me any more time. My thumb is really quick. And so, you know, we start contracting the language. We start contracting our thoughts. If we take the option, thumbs up or thumbs down, like, or, you know, we are allowing our minds and our sensitivities to be dulled and toughened up to become calloused by every time we take a fast food choice, if you like, of reaction.

And I think what novels can do so brilliantly, perhaps better than anything, maybe even. maybe even better than film, is you take time and the story can work over time. And you can choose how long that time is. You can read it in a gulp, perhaps, or you can put it down and pick it up again. And so language does not get eroded in the novel, and the novel can play with it. So I think that unconsciously informed the language that I use in Pod. The whale decides to forego the kind of, you know, power ballads in favor of something punky to get his message across. So the song he chooses is hard and aggressive.

And, you know, it's the declamation of pain and suffering. There are forms of music that people don't like because they're too angry, but there's a poetry as well. And the spinner dolphins only want to hear what they want to hear and the bottle nose do their best. Talking of the expansive quality and the transcendental nature of words, this is a podcast where we talk about the women writers that have shaped us. So I'd love to know which writers have inspired you, which books and pieces of work. Have you taken on just like you described and whether you take on in a gulp or whether you let it imbibe you over time? I'm having a Deborah Levy, one woman book festival to himself at the moment. moment, you know, you come back to things, don't you? And something that you read, even 10 years ago, in my case, I'm now reading her living autobiography with a new awareness. And I was thinking about the women writers who've really shaped me. And as a child, I remember there weren't stories about girls. That's very different now, thank goodness. But there was a Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. There was a wrinkle in time by Madeline Long.

And they were really powerful in my imagination. I love a visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. And that's a book I'll go back to repeatedly because I read it. And I think, how did she do this? And it's there in plain sight. And yet there's a magic in her. And she's just an Olympic gymnast and artist of how to handle time. And that's so fantastic.

I'm so excited that we get to talk about Pod, alongside all of these titles. It's been lovely to chat to you to get under the skin of the author behind the book, the book that I think a lot of people are going to get to know. So thank you for taking the time. And congratulations, once again. I'll see you at the awards in June.

Thank you so much, Vic. It's been a pleasure. Take care. Bye. Many thanks to all the shortlisted authors for taking time out to speak to us about their brilliant books. The winner of the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction will be announced. on the evening of the 14th of June.

I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Please head over to our website to find out more about the shortlisted authors, get exclusive video and audio content and check us out at Women's Prize

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