Behind The Spine

“The reason I thought the cleaner had taken my brush wasn’t because of value. It was to get back at me, you see.” What started as the innocuous tale of a missing hairbrush, potentially stolen by a hotel cleaner, quickly turned into an exciting novel about kleptomania and control.  It may have been just a small and fairly innocuous moment in Senta Rich’s life, but she morphed it into something spec...

“He’s carrying this post-colonial sense that many Black people, many Nigerians and Africans feel. Like, we feel we are subservient - we are not good enough as white people.” Andrew Aziza is a 15 year old boy growing up in Kontagora in Northern Nigeria, wrestling with issues of politics, identity and spirituality. Faced with a feeling that Africa is “cursed”, he finds himself longing to be with a b...

“I became more curious, I think. The longer I’ve written, the more curious I have become. I was somehow liberated when I started to work. I felt like I became more free.” Is it ever too late to finish writing that novel you started all those years ago? Creating a truly great novel takes time - sometimes longer than you think. Today’s author spent an entire decade writing her newly released debut n...

“The girls really want to bring someone home that doesn’t just try to fit in. They want someone who’s going to bring something new to the family lore, to family legend, to the Garnett way of life.” Every family has their own traditions, habits and customs that often seem alien to the outside world. And for large, close-knit families whose lives are entirely intertwined, this can make for a dauntin...

“There is such an unbelievable amount of violence. There is so much unnecessary hurt that women and children are suffering. There have got to be solutions, and we have to keep trying to find those.” No matter where you are in the world, violence against women is frighteningly prevalent, taking many forms and rooted in the power imbalance between the genders. Ayesha Mago is the global advocacy dire...

“If someone wants to write a story that you have researched and really gotten involved with emotionally - if you see someone do it in a different way that opposes your own views - how would that make you feel?” Have you ever had the feeling someone else might be writing the exact same story as you, at the exact same time? Have you ever felt desperate to finish your book in case someone pips you to...

“Faced with a more precarious claim on power, the film industry is depicting men in more stereotypically powerful ways. The big question is ‘what do we do about it’?” The global feminist movement has the same budget as one F35 fighter plane. That alone shows you how much of a chasm there is between the funding for peace and the funding for war. In this International Women’s Day special, we speak t...

“It is as foreign to some people here, as it would be to someone not living here. There’s a kind of feral nature to it that I wanted to capture." Many of us hold a picture postcard view of the Caribbean - steel drums, calypso music and coconut trees - but places like Trinidad have a shockingly dark past.  Kevin Jared Hosein is the author of ‘Hungry Ghosts’, a book which explores the impact of colo...

“We need to get our heads out of the sand, and be open and aware to learning new things, in order to gain new inclusive habits which will enable us to be more sensitive and kinder to others.” Our modern world is a more accepting one, but also a busier one. While we understand better than ever the importance of being kind - it can be difficult to find the time to actually practise kindness. Benjy K...

“It’s so strange, this idea that parts of your life are already determined. And would you want to know? I wouldn’t want to know.” Do you believe in the supernatural? If not, what would make you believe? Or perhaps the question is, where? As a gothic museum home to people with outlandish theories, The Cloisters is the perfect breeding ground for supernatural belief. ‘The Cloisters: The Secret Histo...

“What I trust is if my stories are not so much plot driven but character driven, then the possibilities are endless”. Crime is a genre we all know and love. But what are the perfect ingredients for crafting a crime story that keeps you coming back for more - that stokes the desire to return for a whole series of novels? Well, if you want the recipe, look no further than Simon Mason. He’s the autho...

“Conflict isn’t just between people, it’s within us. We all have inherent contradictions within us. That is the way we’re built.” Feuds, power struggles, tensions and conflict - the workplace can so easily become a hotbed of hostility. Toxic work cultures are frighteningly common - but why? And what can we do about it? Gabriella Braun gets to the very root of this problem in her non-fiction novel...

Series 7 is about to launch, and it’s time to whet your appetite for our most international series to date. Find out what’s coming up, and hear a teaser of our conversation with Gabriella Braun, Director of Working Well, who’ll be kicking the series off by discussing her new book All That We Are: Uncovering the hidden truths behind our behaviour at work.  Tune in from Wednesday 1st February for th...

Ahead of Series 7 which goes live in February, we share some exciting news from our sister project, The Writing Salon. Your host is inkjockey founder Mark Heywood . Behind The Spine is an inkjockey production, and the audio accompaniment to The Writing Salon. Sign up to the newsletter here . You can buy copies of our anthology series here .  You can view the full transcript here. Connect with the...

“This is an expression of everything I feel, in the midlife women around me, this sort of simmering rage that we’re living with. You’re supposed to be the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect friend. It’s a huge, huge pressure.” Held to an incredibly high standard by society and squeezed from all sides, women are fed an ideal that is impossible to live up to. And for...

“Anyone who has spent time in a hospice or sat by the bedside of a dying person knows this…it can be a lot of time to fill. Often weeks on end of sitting around. It’s like hosting a really bad dinner party.” The dramatisation of death is common to see on page, stage and screen - usually all focused around the dying breaths and final moments. But those moments are fleeting, and for those waiting to...

“Grief doesn’t experience time in a linear model. You don’t just grow out of grief by dint of the days passing. That’s why Lily doesn’t have a typical arc - that eureka moment at the end”. Characters won’t always align with your views, or do the things you expect of them. The most authentic and compelling characters are those who lead messy lives and make infuriating decisions - because that’s rea...

“Novels can open a space in which opposing ideas are valid at the same time. In which reality is considered in a complex way.” What defines a novel? Can the genre deal in both fiction and fact? It may seem contradictory, but the ability to play with facts in a novel may actually bring the truth behind them into focus more clearly. Juan Gabriel Vasquez is widely heralded as one of the world’s great...

“I don’t think people have got enough of a taste of what [VR] can offer to really see where it’s going.” It’s been billed as the future of technology, poised to transform entertainment, but virtual reality still hasn’t hit the mainstream. The technology is being used in increasingly interesting and sophisticated ways, but just how far is it from becoming a staple in everybody’s home?  Zillah Watso...

“There is strange conspiracy of silence around romantic comedies” Despite the genre’s huge share of the market, there’s a notion that romantic comedy is without substance and not worthy of critical acclaim. Today’s guest is here to explain why that couldn’t be further from the truth. Emma Hughes is the author of No Such Thing As Perfect, a romantic comedy about Laura Morrison, and her experience t...

“The great pleasure of it was to keep the original London, and lay over it a sheen of how it would have changed. It becomes frighteningly easy to imagine this happening.” What would Britain look like if there was never a Second World War? What if, instead, Britain allowed the Nazi regime to take hold of the country, forming a peaceful Alliance with Germany? This dystopian version of history is the...

“These collectors feel like they have accrued, or put together this cast of characters in one place. These friends who they have grown to know.” To be human is to love rarity - a rare object grants its owner a sense of power, joy and worthiness, that is simply unexplainable. While few of us are ever lucky enough to possess the kinds of rarities you might find in a museum - collectors are a differe...

“It’s mostly women I know, who love horror films in that way, because nothing’s really scarier than the real world things that can happen to us.” For all the horror movie characters who end up as corpses - victims to the slaughter - there are those who escape their demise. One particular type of survivor - the ‘final girl’ - is the subject of much fascination for today’s guest. Isaura Barbé-Brown...

“These poems and artefacts; they inspire more questions than they answer with their narrative incompleteness. They are those areas of black ink - that silence - and I think it’s so enticing.” For the people who lived during the medieval times, the supernatural and natural were not separate. They were intertwined. At a time when nature dominated the landscape, superstition and the belief in fantast...

“When you have nothing, you’re at your most creative” How were your school music lessons - did they inspire you, or leave you wanting? For many the music curriculum fails to speak to them, for others it’s unaffordable to even take part. As vital as music education is, there’s a great deal of inequality and inaccessibility that needs to be addressed. Malaki Patterson is the Artistic Director of The...