Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S7 Ep11: Bookshelfie: Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Former swimmer and entrepreneur Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell discusses her career, details her love of the water, and lays bare the pressures within her former swimming world. Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell is a former elite athlete with a career spanning over 10 years, swimming for both Great Britain and Kenya. She is a former world number one and British champion, winning the 50m and 100m breaststroke in 2010.  She was the first Black woman to swim for the Great Britain team.  In 2023, she was honoured in Forbes 30 Under 30 for her work in Social Impact. Rebecca is also the CEO of the 10,000 Interns Foundation, a non-profit that champions underrepresented talent by creating paid internship opportunities. Prior to this, she founded and ran NKG, a creative strategy and media agency focused on social change projects.  Her first book These Heavy Black Bones is out in June. Rebecca’s book choices are: ** Tar Baby by Toni Morrison ** Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ** Educated by Tara Westover ** In The Wake by Christina Sharpe ** Animal by Lisa Taddeo Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season seven 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 seven? 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. I think writing the book gave me permission to kind of relive the physicality of swimming, and I wanted to write a lot of that onto the page. I wanted to redirect points to feel like they were in my body swimming with me. And it's meant that actually my takeaway from that period of my life has changed a lot, and it's become a lot more focused and entrenched in what my body could do, which was so incredible to push yourself beyond.

What limits you think exist? And rewriting some of those moments, not just the amazing races, but also the training sessions and just thinking, you know, I did that. And that has sharpened my mind and that has made me this person who is very comfortable being uncomfortable. 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 7 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 2024 reading this. Today I am joined by Rebecca Achena Julie Bouchel. Rebecca is a former elite athlete with a career spanning over 10 years swimming for both Great Britain and Kenya. She is a former world number one and British champion, winning the 50 metre and 100 metre stroke in 2010. She was the first black woman to swim for Great Britain. Not content with reigning in sport, Rebecca's 2019 documentary, Breakfast in Casumu, which she directed and produced, premiered at renowned film festival IDFA.

And her essay, Hegemanic America on Immigration and Interracial Relationships, won the 2021 US Justice for Essay Prize. In 2023, she was honoured in Forbes 30 under 30 for a work in social impact. Rebecca is also the CEO of the 10,000 interns Foundation, a non-profit that champions underrepresented talent by creating paid internship opportunities. Prior to this, she founded and ran NKG, a creative strategy and media agency focused on social change projects. Rebecca studied fine art at the University of Oxford. She lives in London, but still calls Kenya home.

Her first book, These Heavy Black Bones, is out in June and charts Rebecca's career ascent, details her singular love of the water and lays bare the pressures within her swimming world. Welcome, Rebecca. Thank you. We were just talking about how you have just voiced the audiobook version of your work. How was that? It was a really intense experience. I have a newfound respect for people like yourselves who do this as a profession,

because it is so hard. It's a really specific kind of focus. It felt a lot like swimming, though. It was really, like there's a lot of endurance needed to do it. And also just, yeah, I guess reading my words out loud, they kind of take on new meaning. And I don't know, it's a moment of reflection. It was really nice.

How did it compare reading it out loud to writing? It was a different experience? Because they're your words at the end of the day. It's a completely different experience. I think especially when you're writing memoir, oftentimes, I mean, this is a generalisation, but it kind of feels a bit like a stream of consciousness. And so sometimes you have these really sprawling sentences

with just like loads and loads of semicolon. And you're reading it and you're like, and then you kind of go in and you have to take this deep breath. And actually my producer was saying, she's like, well, your breathing is really good. And I was like, well, I should hope so because I spent 10 years underwater. So, yeah, it was both physically and, yeah,

and emotionally intense. But it was a really crazy experience. I wasn't expecting it to kind of be so moving. It must be quite therapeutic reading back over those very personal chapters, especially detailing your earlier years. I always find that when I'm journaling, because I need to get things out of my head and they seem a little less insurmountable when I unscrambled them and put them on the page, that there's a catharsis in that. Yeah, I think so. I was speaking to my agent the other day about this and, you know, we were talking about the why. around the book. And, you know, I think a lot of the reason that I wrote it was, I guess,

one to see if I could, but also to suck the poison out. And I think that kind of expunging is really like an important part of any kind of mourning or grieving or remembering process. A lot like my film, which I made after my dad died, and that was very much a reflection on his life, our relationship. So definitely catharsis in that, but also, I don't know, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. and it's kind of nice to go back and see that I got most of it right, which was good. I finished writing the book almost a year ago. And so actually, having had that much distance from it, I think reading it again, I was a lot kinder to myself about how I wrote the story into existence.

Just reading your biography there, it's so varied, it's so impressive. You clearly harness feelings or experiences, things that have happened to you, and turn them into something. That's what's become very clear. And you do, you have to take that deep breath and dive in. Is there a similar level of variety when it comes to your reading? Oh, gosh. That's such an interesting question.

I would say definitely. And that probably comes from, you know, having spent time in academia, kind of passed my first degree, but then also, you know, growing up in Kenya and being exposed to kind of African literary cannons earlier. than I probably would have done otherwise. My dad was a bit of a purist. He was also an academic.

And so I read all the classics when I was very young. I remember just like being in the airport with a copy of like brothers Karamazov, like crying when I was about 10. So, yeah, certainly I very, very particular. And I kind of, yeah, I read what grabs me. Not necessarily what is out there. I come to books in my own time.

Do you find reading to be an escape or is it maybe a grounding? I find reading to be an interrogation of myself. And I always kind of reflect on how much I connect with a book as an indicator of kind of where I'm at and what's going on with my life. You know, there are books that you read at a certain time and they're just okay. And you go back to them at a different point in your life and it just like grabs you by the sternum. And vice versa happens as well. I mean, there are books that I will never read again because I love them so much at the time in my life when I read them and I know, I know that they wouldn't give me that same thing

again. So I think, yeah, I think it's a very personal thing. I don't, I definitely don't escape through books. I find myself. I always say a good book not only changes the way you look at the world, but changes the way you look at yourself. And so I'd love to know how these books that we're going to talk about today have changed the way you've felt, looked at yourself. Your first book-shelfy book is Tar Baby by Tony Morrison. Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jodine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian, a black American now living in Paris and Rome.

Then there's some, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous, a young American black of extreme beauty from small town Florida. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and women, and whites, masters and servants, and men and women. Now, Tony Morrison, I mean, you, you like clutched your pearls there at her name. She's an acclaimed writer. I guess often select her titles on this podcast.

But I don't think I've had anyone select her baby. What made this book stand out for you? The prose and her writing is just breathtaking in this book. I think the first time I read it, I got about a third of the way through. And then I had to go back to kind of actually see when she swapped between kind of first person and narrator. And it's so fluid. It's so interesting the way that, I don't know, just the writing is lyrical, but it embodies both of their characters so much, even though she moves between, you know, the first and the other. I think it's a really different novel for her.

Yeah. I think that's probably what, you know, what really grabbed me about Tar Baby. and the descriptions of New York are just incredible. I think especially having spent quite a lot of time in Harlem over the last couple of years. Yeah, it just, it really, it stayed with me and has stayed with me forever. I was reading it this morning again, actually. Oh, I'm glad that you'd sit back in.

Well, I felt like I was being being queer, so I was like, just got to just make a couple of notes before. Like a great reason. A great reason, too. You said that Tony Morrison gives you permission to give in to yourself and what you want. can you tell me a little bit more about that? Her writing and her, the way she kind of renders truth is so, I don't know, it just, it cuts to the heart of, I think, the depravity that's within everybody and it's very primal and kind of carnal, especially the way she writes about women and what they want and what they sacrifice for what they want. And I think, yeah, she demands that we live like big and ugly lives, which I guess,

is kind of what we're all trying to do. And it's, yeah, it's, that's where the beauty is. And she always kind of pulls that out at the very end of the book. There's always this kind of beautiful recompense when everything comes together in whatever way, even if it's dreadful and horrible and sad. It's, yeah, it always feels like a kind of final crescendo that demands that you kind of give in to yourself. You mentioned these depictions of New York and talked about how you have been spending

time in Harlem. You grew up in Kenya and, you know, clearly your dad's had a huge influence on your reading. Talk to me about living in a few different countries, moving around, experiencing the world like that growing up. How did that impact you? I think I grew up very quickly, but also I had no real sense of how magical my childhood was when I was experiencing it. You know, it's funny growing up especially as I did, my parents were both humanitarian aid workers, so we moved all the time. My mum, my mum. I did Malawi, Uganda, Kenya. I was in Cape Town for a couple of years.

And then we moved back to, well, I moved back to the UK when I was 13, but my family was still over in Kenya. And then it was all the travel for swimming as well. So, you know, by the time I was 18, I think I was on my third passport. I'd been like all over the world, which is incredible. And still, the only thing I wanted was to, you know, have this static house and live next door to my best friends and not have moved schools a thousand times. and I was always so jealous of the kids that, you know, had had these kind of very, very static lives.

But it's only now that I kind of see it for what it was, which was just this incredible exposure to, you know, a kind of cultural literacy that has definitely, definitely shaped my reading and my experience for the world, but also a home isn't any one place, which is such a blessing and has also felt like a curse at points. but yeah, now I'm very happy for it. It sounds like you found home in a number of different places, including in the books that you read. And I assume in the water as well. So at what point did you start swimming? What was the catalyst? Oh gosh, I was talking about this the other day, actually.

Like a lot of people with black heritage and black background, I was terrified of the water when I was younger. Oh, I know it. I know it in my household. I was terrified of the water when I was younger. And actually, someone was asking me about my parents, you know, and they were like, well, you know, you come from a family of swimmers. And I actually, my mom taught my dad to swim when he was 45. So it was very much not.

I was very much not from a swimming family. But I am Luo. That's the tribe that I come from in Kenya and more on the shore of Lake Victoria, which is this huge, huge body of water. And in Uganda, I think it was my third birthday. I wouldn't go in the water unless I had armbands on and like a rubber ring and my mom was holding me. and I just wouldn't let her let go. But I don't know, something changed that weekend. And I just felt in communion with the water as my ancestors had been.

Like, I learned to swim in the same place that my father would have grown up and my grandparents. And then, I don't know, then it changed. Everything changed. And it's felt easier than walking since that moment. So at a very young age, you had a rigorous training schedule when I'm sure your friends were doing other things. Yes, they were doing other things. It's funny, I don't, there are very few moments that I look back on in my adolescence and think, I wish I'd gone to that party or there are some really specific moments I remember missing out on.

I think I remember what some of my friends going to play like laser tag once and I'd never been to play laser tag and I was just so bummed out that I had to go to training, which is such a specific thing to feel like you're missing. It's never too late. Do you know what? I still haven't played laser tag. Because I'm just going next week. Oh my God. It's for my nephew's birthday. So you want to come.

I might take you off on that. So, you know, I think I felt really singularly focused on this destiny. You kind of have to buy into it so wholeheartedly to keep yourself in that regime constantly. You know, there has to be a belief that this is for you and this is the thing that you're supposed to be. doing because it is it is insane it's eight nine sessions a week up at four 45 six hours in the pool every day plus weights you're 13 14 you know I didn't stop my period until I was 16 I was just doing so much exercise running at the weekends and then you wait for all to end on Sunday and then you get up and do it again for 50 weeks a year why did you want to compete I love to win and I love the feeling

of my body in the water. It made so much sense to me to move in that way and my body always responded to what I wanted from it kind of so easily and specifically in the water but in every sport I've always loved to move. And it happens slowly. It's a strange thing. You kind of don't, I don't think that I was necessarily one of those people who kind of charged into the swimming career. it just, I started doing some competitions and I loved it and I got better and my mom kept taking me and then suddenly, you know, you're just in the pool all the time and you never get out. And the rest, as they say, is history. Your second book, Shelby book is Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda and Gose Adichie.

Our 2020 winner of winners at the Women's Prize for Fiction, half of a yellow son tells the story of Uguu, a boy from a poor village who works as a house boy for a university professor. Olana, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. And Richard, a shy English writer, is enthralled to Alana's enigmatic twin sister. As the horrific Biafran war engulfs them, they are thrown together and pulled apart in ways they had never imagined.

This is my favourite book as well. I love this book so much. Why did you choose it? Oh You know, I've only ever had this experience with one other book and bizarrely that was the Northern Lights trilogy by Philip Paul. Oh, but iconic of a time. I ruined a whole family holiday when I finished that trilogy of books

because I cried for a whole week. And I just couldn't, I couldn't stand the idea that they were separated by this thing that was bigger than everything. and, you know, I think this book just gone inside me, half of a yellow sun, was so, it made me understand the plight of my continent in a way that I kind of had never really believed was possible. My father was a freedom fighter and he was in prison during the apartheid movement, exiled from Kenya just after the post-colonial transition in 64. And that generation and those stories and that time is so lost to kind of academic. writing and this was the first time that I'd read it in novel form. It's just the most heartbreaking book and it's so beautiful. You're right. It's that education at the same time as being

philosophical. Without philosophizing, I would say, you know, this book taught me about my mum's history. She was a child during the Biafran war and she's told me about running away from bombs. She's told me about starving, but she didn't know the socioeconomic background to it because She was a kid. And this plugged the gaps. It helped me understand where it come from. Your dad sounds incredible. He was.

How much did you understand growing up of his plight of what he fought for? You know, I think my mom was amazing. My mom is amazing. She was very young when she had me. And, you know, as I kind of got up to be her age mate or the age she was then and surpassed that age, I have no idea how she did that. But she was so determined to keep me connected. connected to him and connected to that part of my ancestry.

So my father is Black Canyon, Luo. My mother is white British. And I was born in 94. So the year the apartheid regime fell. And my father went back to South Africa for the liberation of his people. And, you know, I write in my book because I later learned that, you know, my mother said if it felt like it was a choice that he should leave anyway. And so he wasn't around.

in my life. He was absent enough for me to paint things onto him. And it's funny when I, now that I'm older and less angry, as all teenage girls are, I, you know, find myself painting these very kind and generous things onto him and really understanding who he was and what he sacrificed for. I think being mixed race is very, it's a very complicated between, betwixt existence. And I grew up in quite a white world. I didn't really fully understand. you know, who he was and what he meant to the continent to that generation of people. I wish I'd spent more time with him and in that part of my life when I was younger. You can't change the past.

And I think it is often the case that as you get older, you start to understand because you are your mother and you are your father. I know you read this book after your dad died. Did it help you with a time of profound change and grief? Was it salve? Yes, yeah, books are always the self and this one absolutely, I think. There's this quote that I love and I remember reading this is such a cliche when I was living in Paris at the Shakespeare bookshop. And it was in the window and it says if you're looking for a shared sense of humanity, you will find that in very good art.

And I think when I read this book, you know, I mean, without spoiling the ending for anybody, there is, a grief and a heartbreak that kind of builds and mounts throughout the whole book and the crescendo isn't satisfying and I think grief isn't satisfying and there's no divine retribution like you just go on living and I think this book taught me that or at least reflected that back to me. You described this novel as a masterclass in storytelling. Now Chimamanda and Gossi Adichie is I think the finest writer of our generation. What do you think she does? feels so well in her craft. Why does it get you like that?

I think there are very few contemporary fiction works that kind of get outside of, I don't know, the centrifugal pull and tone and way of working. And she just has kind of moved the centre a little bit with her writing. It's so unapologetic in the way that she melds. her own heritage, the languages of her country, and it's just like a punch in the face. And I think that that's it. Yeah.

It's just, I think that that has in some way changed kind of what is expected of contemporary writers. I think Zadie Smith did that in some way with white teeth. And yeah, Chimamander has taken that even further, especially with, with half of the yellow sun. It's my favourite of her works. Baileys 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 baileys.com for our favourite bailey's recipes. The third book that you've brought today is educated by Tara Westover. Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of days and she spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating emergency supplies,

hoping that when the world of men failed, her family would continue on unaffected. She had no school records because she'd never set foot in a classroom and no medical records because her father didn't believe in doctors or hospitals. At 16, Tara decided to educate herself. Her struggle for knowledge would take her far from her Idaho mountains over oceans and across continents to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd travelled too far, if there was still a way home. You told me that this is one of the best memoirs you've ever read. What makes it so powerful?

It's such a conflict and contradiction what she tries to do in this book, which is to paint a picture of the people that raised you and hold that intention with, you know, the universal and also specifically kind of female struggle for education. I read this actually when I was really struggling through something similar with these heavy black bones writing about my family, specifically my relationship with my mother. And I couldn't believe how generous she was able to be with those renderings, but also it's so real. It's so, I mean, it's real, because it's a real bloody story, but it's so, it's so visceral, and it gets inside you

and the people that she writes about are so real because she writes about them so truly. You know, and I think a lot of people talk about memoirs as being brave. I think it's not necessarily that she writes bravely, but she, I don't know, she writes against fear, which I think is, yeah, it's an incredible book. Did you find it instructive in writing your own?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think she also talks a lot in the book and she has these annotations throughout that kind of caveat what she believes about memory. And it's this really difficult thing when you're writing memoir because it's not an autobiography. It is memoir and it is memory and the truth is complex and slippery and it's also your own. and she acknowledges that through her writing, which I think is really interesting, that she's like,

this is how I remember this event. This is how the event was told back to me by somebody else. And like, this is how somebody else remembered the event. And she kind of paints these pictures, which are multidimensional. But it's like pinning a moving target. And I think being given permission to kind of accept that,

yeah, that it's not static. And you have to just write anyway. Tell me about your own transformation, your own journey into academia, when you went to university, you discovered an identity beyond swimming. What was that like? Well, I think I was running from something. You know, definitely I wanted to reinvent myself. And I don't know, Oxler was so, it was so strange, the best and the worst times.

It was really interesting to be kind of so proximal to power structures and institutions that I didn't really have any concept of. I didn't, I'd meet people and their names would be on the building of libraries. And, you know, there was so much history in that institution. And that academia is, it's very much apart from swimming. Swimming is something very clinical. It's just you and the pool and the clock is just ticking down, down, down. And you're either first or your second or your third. And, yeah, in my academic world, it was so much more about the who you know and the how,

And yeah, you never really quite knew if you were right. You knew if you were wrong. But you never quite knew if you were right. And that was a strange thing. It was strange suddenly being in this high performance space that wasn't easily delineated. It wasn't easily won. It wasn't easily navigated. And yeah, I've struggled with academia ever since.

And also, I guess, because of my relationship with my father once he passed away, I thought, thank God, never going to have. to get my PhD and I'm never going to have to eat the heads of the fish as well, including the eye, which he would always force me to eat. Oh, I love the eye. We fight over the eye in our house. Yeah, it's a, it was, I mean, there is a big thing about the eye as well. And I was little old me who grew up in born in Warrington, like in the middle of Kenya and being forced to eat this fish eye. I'm like, did you feel pressure from your dad's to, to study? Yeah, I mean, I think he always wanted that for me. I'm very lucky to probably have fulfilled all of his hopes for me in his

lifetime. And I think lucky as still to have always felt warm by his pride. But he left in me this kind of legacy and need to kind of carry on his legacy. When he died, I finished his final book with my uncle, actually, who's also an academics, big family of professors. And that was a really, really lovely experience. Also a very hardcore academic experience, markups and a huge amount of research and binding. And I was in my first year of my PhD at the point in time, which, sorry, Dad, I have not finished. Pause, but not forgotten. You quit swimming while you were training for the 2012 Olympics. That's right. Why was that what happened? Gosh, so many, many things happened. And I was ranked first in the world when I was 15, and the year after I won British Championships,

and my world kind of exploded. Swimming stopped being about the process, and it just became this very outcome-focused, very terrifying arena where the color of my skin was interrogated as much as how fast I was able to swim, and it felt like I had a lot of people to prove wrong. And the press didn't help, I mean, it was what, 2000? eight, nine. We didn't have the same kind of language that we do now to talk about racism. It was just a feeling. And it's funny looking back on some of the stuff as I did when I was writing. You know, some of the articles were insane. I remember one broad sheet paper writing, you know,

she speaks with a cut glass British accent. And, you know, I think it's like, well, whatever. How does I speak? Effing way am I going to speak, having a British passport and being British. there was just this huge kind of externalizing of like who I was and what I was doing and whether or not I would be able to do it and you know I don't know I just I got to 17 and I thought even if I do get on the podium you know this isn't going to be worth it not for me we're going to talk about that media shorthand the first black woman to swim for team GB in just a moment but I think this is a good time to talk about your fourth book which is in the wake by

Christina Sharp. In this original entrenchant work, Christina Sharp interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and cotidian representations of black life that comprise what she calls the autography of the wake. Activating multiple registers of wake, the word wake, the path behind the ship, keeping watch for the dead, coming to consciousness. Sharp illustrates how black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Formulating the wake and wake work as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora in the wake offers a way forward. Now, we talked about your PhD that you embarked upon, paused. This book helped you push through

some doubts that you had about being a professional academic. What did you find so inspiring? I think what's interesting about professional academia, which I feel like somebody should have told me, but it's quite self-evidence. So I don't know whether that's a particularly fair thing to say. But it is a profession. And when you go to grad school in America, you're taught how to work in the profession of academia. And I think that we all have, or I certainly had very romantic ideals about what academia or being an academia or being an academic would feel like. It was the same when I was writing the book, really. I remember starting to think about writing it and imagining myself like in a little cafe,

it's like just me writing a book, which it was not like at all. And neither was academia. It was hardcore as hell. You know, I was teaching from the very beginning of my course. And you're taught to write and express and think in a way that is very parametered. It follows a blueprint of what's gone before. it creates and generates work that exists in a canon that's very prescribed, like article writing, the way that you reference, you know, the way that you kind of interrogate other

academic product. And Christina Sharp, I don't know, this book I think reminds me of when I read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Like, it's so, in the way that that genre bending of a memoir, this is very genre bending of academia and academic writing. I mean, it's almost meta, like she within the book has these excerpts and these moments where she does wake work. And, you know, she talks about wake work as this thing that is to write back against violence. And I think the violence of academia is something that I felt a lot, especially being in an African cultural studies department in the Midwestern America, super white. It was 2020.

George Floyd had just been murdered just many miles away. and all of my colleagues were African students. And so we're interrogating the existence of African cultural studies while studying it, while studying it in the Western world. And she offered a way of existing in that micro climate of academic violence, which is representative of, yeah, the macro climate of violence against black people and the African diaspora, but blackness the world over. It's a very amazing book.

It's hard reading. It was so weird going back to academia after five years. I was like, my God, I'm so stupid. But it was, yeah, it's an amazing book. Talk to me about the difference between visibility and true diversity. I want to return to that shorthand that was used in the media, the first black woman to swim for Team G.B. it's a fact, but there is real damage that can be done when you have to handle all the pressure

of being the only or the first without the structural support in place to help with that. Yeah, it's something I think about a lot. It's a lot of the work that I do now on the day to day is about navigating that tension between the real need for representation. And that's part of why I wrote the book. You know, somebody has to be first. and it happened to be me. And it's important that young black and brown girls understand what that means

and that there is a way. There's a way forward. But as we can see with our current bunch of politicians, you know, a couple of black and brown people at the top is not going to save us. And so the institutions and they have a lot of work to do to interrogate themselves in thinking about who gets in. who can access these sports and the media has a responsibility within that to ensure that it's not creating narratives that are closing off these already tiny access points for

underrepresented or minoritized communities and so it's something I really struggle with I struggle with the idea of being a role model I don't like visibility I'm like a very strange areas where I kind of keep doing things that make me the center of attention but I hate being the central attention. And so it's like a horrible dichotomy that I'm always experiencing and trying to understand. And it's the same way I feel about representation. It is so necessary that people stand up and say, yes, we can. And yes, you can. And I did. And so can you. But it also puts a huge weight upon those people to be the agitators within the institutions that, you know, a singular person is not going to be able to make the change needed to kind of open these things up.

It's like what you were saying at the beginning, I hated having to read out my book at first or listen back to the words, but they're your words and they're so much more powerful because you're reading them. Right. You are the CEO of the 10,000 interns foundation, which creates opportunities for underrepresented students by partnering with UK businesses for paid internships. It's important. Tell me why you wanted to embark on that. It was a really interesting time in my life. I just got back from the States. COVID had just ended and I was kind of trying to figure out

what I was going to do with my PhD. And I got approached about this job. And I really struggled with it at first because I struggled with the idea that we were, you know, I guess just creating an access point to institutions that weren't meaningfully ready to include the people that we were putting into them. We have a program for young black students and graduates called 10,000 black interns.

And I don't know. Eventually I kind of, I guess, reconciled my politics as being, it's really important to give people, especially people in our community, the luxury of choice. It's not for me to decide whether people, when they have that luxury of choice, want to be capitalist. That's nothing to do with me. But, you know, I think there's a lot of discourse, especially from the kind of liberal elite, which says that we should all. be involved in decolonization and we should all be thinking about black futures as, you know, being this kind of burn the house down liberation. And it's not that I don't believe in that, but we need to get out of poverty first. We need to close the racial pay gap before we can

meaningfully do the next thing. And so, yeah, I guess I wanted to be involved in ensuring that the distribution of opportunity is as equal as the distribution of talent. It's time. now to talk about your fifth and final book, shall be a book, which is Animal by Lisa Todaya. What a way to finish. What a journey you've taken us on, honestly. Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruel acts of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her,

she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child that has haunted her every waking moment while forging the power to finally strike back. You feel like so much of you and your friend are inside this unbelievable novel. Tell me more about that. I have felt so much rage throughout my life and I think that's a very female experience.

you know, it's funny somebody was saying to me the other day, well, it's kind of better than, you know, being portrayed as the kind of angry black woman and I was like, I am angry. I am angry. And I think Francesca and I,

that's my friend who also has impeccable taste and is probably the only person whose book recommendations I really take very seriously and immediately. But we came up so much against this when we were at university and I think really struggled with that notion of kind of patriarchy

and what it meant to really kind of live in its shadow. And this book, I remember just she gave it to me actually for my 29th birthday last year and I just tore through it in about four days and it felt like life force being drained back into me. It's also such an insane book. It's a really hyper-referial. real, but the twists and the kind of jolts of electricity that run through it are just like sucker punches.

It's so nuts. And I remember thinking, or just being really, really in awe of Elisa's imagination and mind to kind of rent a novel that was so, so relatable, but also so mad as a story. I think that that's just quite a powerful, incredible thing to have done. I've got written here that this book made you want to change your life. In what way? Oh, God, I don't think I can talk about that on the podcast. In what way?

I think it made me feel like freedom or my version of freedom with something I was going to have to get up and take and that the taking of it wouldn't be easy. And so I guess I started making decisions that allowed me to move towards it. I started doing what I wanted just because I wanted to. I'm going to really take away today what you've just said about being angry. Because as a black woman, you do get the label, angry black women. And I spent a lot of time trying to tell people that it wasn't okay to be labeled that.

When in truth, I am angry. And actually that was distracting us, detracting from the things that I'm angry about. They need to change. Stop making me angry. And stay angry if you are. If my takeaway from today's podcast is to stay angry, then so be it. How has that anger ebbed and flowed in you over the years? I think anger like fear is such a powerful motivator. I think fear is the thing that pushes you to keep moving forward.

You know, I think a lot of people talk about fear is this thing that holds you back, but I've always felt like fear is the thing that gives me the will to go beyond. And I think anger is the thing that makes sure I don't let anything stop me. And so I'm, yeah, I'll stay angry and fearful. Well, because harnessing those are what compel you to do things like write a book, for example, these heavy black bones out in June. What was the compulsion to write it? Probably exactly, exactly those two feelings.

In 2020, after the re-erruption of the BLM movement and Alice Deering having qualified for the Olympic team, she became the first black woman to swim for Great Britain at an Olympics. And obviously I quit just before the 2012 Olympics 10 years earlier. And, you know, my name is. popped up in the press again and my mom bless her still has a google alert on me she needs to turn it off i know because it's a lot very soon and you know she's very she's she's the best best person i know and i don't know it felt like it had been long enough for me to look back and that fear that i felt

as a young girl and that anger that i couldn't understand as a young adult had become something that felt productive and something that felt like it was going to enable me to bring this story into the world and to move past this point in my life that has made me so much of who I am. And, you know, I think writing against that fear and writing with that anger behind me meant that when I finished the book, I realized that it's going to be with me forever. and actually in some ways I'm glad it's going to be an object in the world because I never want to let it go. You know, it's probably, I love words almost as much as I love the water and I find writing almost as easy and yet all-consuming as I did swimming. So it felt very fitting, like coming back to myself.

And although it is immortalised on the page now, just sitting in this room, in this moment, when you look back on your swimming career, What are your lasting memories? I think writing the book gave me permission to kind of relive the physicality of swimming, and I wanted to write a lot of that onto the page. I wanted the reader at points to feel like they were in my body swimming with me. And it's meant that actually my takeaway from that period of my life has changed a lot,

and it's become a lot more focused and entrenched in what my body could do, which was so incredible to push yourself beyond what limits you think exist. And rewriting some of those moments, not just the amazing races, but also the training sessions and just thinking, you know, I did that and that has sharpened my mind and that has made me this person who is very comfortable being uncomfortable. Yeah, I had a lot of respect for myself for being able to endure what I did and also, you know, loving it in a lot of ways. I think that's probably the thing that will stay with me that is inside me and will be with me for Emma.

What an amazing exercise in looking back and going, I did that. I did that. And then you can look at the book and say, well, I did that too. It's funny. Some of the, it's, it's been read by ex-athletes, but it's also been read by non-athletes and one of the biggest pieces of feedback. People are like, did that really happen? Like, did you really train until you threw up and then get back in the pool? And I was like, yeah, it's just Tuesday. We did that all the time. If you had to choose just one book from your list, and we've been on a journey, as a favourite, which one would it be in why?

I think we owe so much to Tony Morrison, so I would be remiss if I didn't take Tar Baby to my desert island or wherever I'm going. But I would maybe swim back and get some more books as well. I've never actually thought where it is we're going with this book. Yeah, where are we going? I'd like to be on a beach. I'd like to be no water. Me too, so let's say that. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing with us today. It's been such a pleasure to chat to you, Rebecca, honestly, and the best of luck with the book.

Thank you so much and thank you for having you. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.