Fictionable

In this autumn series of podcasts we've heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and Seán Padraic Birnie. This week we welcome Shauna Mackay to discuss her short story Matching up the Pattern at the Join. Mackay tells us how her short stories are driven by voice, by characters she conjures up and then follows on the page: "I sound like a witch now." The characters come from mixing and banging words...

This autumn we've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and her band, Qarpa. This week we have an appointment with Seán Padraic Birnie and his story The Medical Room. Birnie tells us how he was fuelled by frustration at work and struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It made me laugh, I think," he says, "but I wasn't sure it would make anyone else laugh." Elements of the gruesome offi...

After hearing last week from M John Harrison, who discussed how he makes fiction from fragments of reality, this week we turn it up to eleven as we welcome Irena Karpa. Fuelled by the latest track from her band, Qarpa, she reads from Kate Tsurkan's translation of her short story, Fellow Traveler, and gives us the inside track on that journey. Karpa explains why the language from the streets that s...

Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie, Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt. But we launch this autumn podcast series with M John Harrison and his haunting short story, I Can't Tell. Harrison tells us how he constructs his stories from fragments of real life, filed in notebooks and then reassembled into uncanny structures on the page. At one stage, this process...

This summer we've been hearing a little more from our amazing authors in an expanded series of podcasts. Joyce Carol Oates confessed she feels "like a fourteen-year-old girl" while Fiona Mozley admitted to an "awkward personality". José Falero – voiced by Maria Jacqueline Evans – argued that the 21st century's obscene inequalities can only be addressed through "diversity in the spaces of power" an...

In this summer's new, expanded podcast we've already heard from Joyce Carol Oates, Fiona Mozley and José Falero – translated and interpreted by Maria Jacqueline Evans. This time we're heading north to catch up with Donal McLaughlin and his story runaway. McLaughlin has been writing short stories about his main character, Liam O'Donnell, for thirty years. Both author and protagonist grew up in the...

We've heard already this summer from Joyce Carol Oates and Fiona Mozley, but now the translator Maria Jacqueline Evans turns interpreter as we talk – via the magic of email – to José Falero. He tells us why he wanted to look at the violence of a flash kidnapping from the inside in his short story Flash of Dignity, and what drives his characters to attack a woman at gunpoint and throw her in the bo...

After hearing last week how Joyce Carol Oates is firmly focused on the future, this week we’re focusing on Fiona Mozley and her mighty story Cadair Idris. She tells us how this trip up the mountain began on a family holiday and explores how characters suffering from mental illness pose a particular challenge for writers of fiction. As the kind of author who has always tried to put herself in other...

It's revolution on the Fictionable podcast, where we've evolved again to hear more from our fabulous contributors. We're devoting an entire programme to Joyce Carol Oates and her fantastic story Small Veins, with Fiona Mozley, José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan all joining us over the coming weeks. In this programme, Oates tells us how she paid f...

The Fictionable podcast heads for Tel Aviv, where Etgar Keret talks about the mystery of translation, the surrealism of technology and surprising himself with his own fiction. The sudden reverses in stories like Point of No Return are rarely planned in from the start, Keret explains, but emerge as he writes – an impulse towards instability he attributes to his upbringing as the child of two Holoca...

On this edition of the Fictionable podcast, Diana Evans tells us how she started cooking up her short story Broth. She talks about minimalism in fiction, female friendship and how the category "black writing" doesn't make any sense. She also gives us a heads up about her forthcoming novel, A House for Alice, which finds the characters from Ordinary People struggling with questions of family and ho...

Evie Wyld joins us for the second edition of the Fictionable podcast to spill the beans about the inspiration for her short story The Land. She tells us about childhood holidays in a rat-infested caravan on the Isle of Wight and how she's fascinated by the twists and folds of time. She also keeps us up to the minute, confessing that she can go wild when she writes in the present tense. We also wel...

For the first edition of the Fictionable podcast, we welcome Sarah Hall, who reveals the inspirations for her story Be Good. She also explains why she chose to tell this haunting story in the second person, and why authors outside of the capital sometimes find themselves written out of the national conversation. We hear about all the stories in Summer 2022, with short readings from Hall, Alain Mab...