Fictionable

In this Winter season we've already heard from Helga Schubert, Ben Sorgiovanni and Julian George. Joanna Kavenna will be rounding off the series next time, but right here and now we welcome Rachida Lamrabet and her short story Two Girls on Bicycles, translated by Johanna McCalmont. Lamrabet recalls how this story was set in motion by a chance encounter with an old friend, which brought back memori...

So far we've heard from Helga Schubert and Ben Sorgiovanni in this Winter season. We'll be welcoming Joanna Kavenna and Rachida Lamrabet over the next couple of weeks, but for this feature we present Julian George and The Movie Lovers. George tells us how this short story emerged from the classic 1950s sitcom, The Honeymooners. "I just thought of the character played by Audrey Meadows, Alice," he...

This Winter series of podcasts got underway with Helga Schubert, who told us how she put together her short story On Getting Up from pieces of her past. This season we'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet and Julian George, but this time we meet Ben Sorgiovanni and his story No One Here Knows You. He tells us how this story grew out of a philosophical thought experiment about how yo...

As the world lurches into 2025 we launch into another series of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet, Ben Sorgiovanni and Julian George over the next few weeks, but we start with Helga Schubert and her short story On Getting Up, translated by Aaron Sayne and Lillian M Banks. Banks turns interpreter as Schubert explains how this story was awakened by an appea...

Last year we heard from Daisy Johnson, Judith Vanistendael, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb. We bring our Autumn series to a close – just in time for Winter – with Esther Karin Mngodo and the translator Jay Boss Rubin, who join us to talk about First Date. Mngodo tells us how this story ate another of her short stories, Without Sun. "It came from the idea of how things are within other things," she s...

We opened this Autumn season with Daisy Johnson and followed up with Judith Vanistendael and Scott Jacobs. We'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo over the next week or so, but this episode is devoted to Hannah Webb and her short story Titanic. While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists that her story is definitely not autobiographical. "I...

This season we've already heard from Daisy Johnson and Judith Vanistendael. Over the next few weeks we'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo and Hannah Webb, but this time we welcome Scott Jacobs and his short story Be Careful Who Your Friends Are. According to Jacobs, this curious tale was a "real-life experience". "I changed the names, to protect the innocent," he says, "including the name...

In the first of our Autumn podcasts, Daisy Johnson told us how she was living on the edge when she was writing her collection The Hotel, and read from her short story Conference. Over the course of this season we'll be ranging all round the world to hear from Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but this time Judith Vanistendael explains why The Small Story is very close to home. Thi...

The leaves are swirling, there's a nip in the air, so it's time for a whole new bunch of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Judith Vanistendael, Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but we're launching into Autumn with Daisy Johnson and her short story Conference. Conference appears in Johnson's forthcoming collection, The Hotel, and she explains that...

This Summer podcast series has brought us Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck – translated by Ellen Jones – and Jack Klausner. We bring it to a close with Susan Muaddi Darraj and her mighty story May You Wake Up to a Homeland. Darraj tells us that she started with an image, an old man in his kitchen "looking at this bizarre package of frozen food". That and the thought of him sitting the...

Already this summer we've heard from Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones. This time we're getting under the surface of Jack Klausner's short story The Coalface. Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea. "It sort of spun out from there," he says. While...

This summer series has already brought us Samantha Harvey and Patrick Cash. Now it's time for Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones, with Bruck's short story China. We start with questions of vocabulary, as Bruck clears up exactly what a china is and fills us in on the cultural significance of the gaucho. The author says she was writing against Esteban Echeverría's poem The Captive, invert...

Last time Samantha Harvey let the cat out of the bag, diving straight into the heart of her story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. This time Patrick Cash is a little less spoiler heavy as he talks about and reads from his story Trish Malone. Cash tells us how the cabaret artist who takes a leading role came to his rescue a few years back and has been "wandering around" ever since. He recalls work as a jour...

The weather may be up the spout but it's still summer, so it's time for another batch of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Susan Muaddi Darraj, Carolina Bruck, Patrick Cash and Jack Klausner in this summer season. But Summer opens with Samantha Harvey and her mighty short story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. If you haven't read it already, you might want to head over there before you hit play,...

In this Spring series of podcasts we've heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. We bring it to a close with Jakub Żulczyk and his story Many Years of Hardships, translated by John and Małgorzata Markoff. Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Lights, a semi-autobiographical novel which the author...

This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister? Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?" "I've always really liked the witch's res...

In this Spring series of podcasts we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck and Grahame Williams. Now it's time for Lauren Caroline Smith and her short story The Placing of Hands. Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a predominantly secular culture. Our culture is very i...

Last time we heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, who told us that before her latest novel Kairos she'd "never written a love story". This time we welcome Grahame Williams and his short story Making It Happen. Like the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, an inspirational figure in Making It Happen, Williams says he's not much of a planner: "If there's a spark, then let's just start writing and see where i...

Spring has finally sprung and with it another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. But we launch into Spring with Jenny Erpenbeck and her haunting short story Sloughing Off One Skin. When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck began by reading from the opening of the story in Germ...

We've already heard from Linda Mannheim , Richard Smyth , Ariel Marken Jack . and Robert Neuwirth in this Winter series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Liam Hogan and his short story Backstory . Hogan tells us how it all came from his suspicion of heroes. "They often have it far too easy," he explains. "If you have someone with supreme skills then… what's the challenge?" There's a dar...

In this Winter series of podcasts we've heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth and Ariel Marken Jack. This time we welcome Robert Neuwirth and his short story The Disambiguation. Neuwirth tells us how his story started from a couple of one-liners that were driving him crazy and wound up stuffed full of computer code. We anthropomorphise the machines that surround us, he says, so we keep expectin...

We've already heard from Linda Mannheim and Richard Smyth in this Winter series, and now it's time for Ariel Marken Jack and their story The Bread Boy. Marken Jack tells us how their writing began in isolation, flat on their back with chronic fatigue syndrome. This debilitating illness is giving rise to writing they call "the most 21st-century form of literature that I can imagine… Who among us do...

Last week we heard from Linda Mannheim, who told us that the only way she can go back to the neighbourhood where she grew up is in fiction. This time we welcome Richard Smyth and his short story Karóly Bálint's Metaphor. Smyth explains how his story isn’t exactly set in Budapest and reflects on how the bleakness of the steppe echoes the stereotypical grimness of the north of England. Writing in th...

In this Winter series of podcasts, we'll be hearing from Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack, Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan. We start off with Linda Mannheim, who joined us down the line from Berlin. Mannheim explains how the central character in her story Those Last Days appeared to her "out of the blue" and how she found her fiction inexorably drawn back to her childhood in Washington Heights. Thi...

We've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie and Shauna Mackay on the Fictionable podcast. Now we bring this autumn series to a close with Catriona Bolt and her mycological short story Bloom. Bolt tells us how she fell in love with mushrooms despite, or perhaps because of, their double nature. These mysterious organisms were the perfect lens through which to explore t...