Season 4 · New episodes every Wednesday
Hosted by Nora Ellis. Long-form interviews on craft, revision, rejection and the business of publishing — for authors building a body of work and readers who want to know how it's made.
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Featured episode
Episode 126 · Craft
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Novelist & essayist
Four years, one abandoned narrator and a shelf of Biafran war memoirs. Adichie on research as a cure for fear, the danger of the single story, and why she threw away two years of work.
Play this episodeLatest episodes
Ep. 12502:01Craftwith Kazuo Ishiguro — Novelist, Nobel laureate
On the four-week writing 'crash', building a narrator whose feelings are all in the silences, and why he drafts imagining a reader in translation.
Ep. 12401:54Craftwith Margaret Atwood — Novelist & poet
Frame stories, longhand mornings and why she'd rather be called a filing clerk than a prophet. Also: read your contracts more carefully than your reviews.
Ep. 12301:45Revisionwith Colson Whitehead — Novelist
Why he shelved his best idea until he could carry it, how he rationed the research, and building a novel where every state is a different genre of America.
Upcoming live events
25 dates announced — each one counts down and files itself into the archive the moment it starts.
Live recordingUpcomingHalf of a Yellow Sun · Fourth Estate, 2006
with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Novelist & essayist
Women's Prize for Fiction, 2007
Our season-four opener: Adichie on the discarded narrator of Half of a Yellow Sun and the memoirs she read until she stopped being frightened.
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In conversationUpcomingThe Blind Assassin · McClelland & Stewart, 2000
with Margaret Atwood — Novelist & poet
Booker Prize, 2000
Atwood on six decades of bad first pages, and why she stopped waiting for a good mood some time in the 1970s.
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In conversationUpcomingThe Remains of the Day · Faber & Faber, 1989
with Kazuo Ishiguro — Novelist, Nobel laureate
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2017
Ishiguro reconstructs the month in 1987 when he answered no letters and no telephone calls, hour by hour.
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In conversationUpcomingFlights · Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2007
with Olga Tokarczuk — Novelist, Nobel laureate
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2018
Tokarczuk and her translator argue in public about three fragments, with the audience voting on each one.
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WorkshopUpcomingThe Underground Railroad · Doubleday, 2016
with Colson Whitehead — Novelist
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017
A two-hour session on rationing research, timing your own readiness, and structure as a map of genres.
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Reading & Q&AUpcomingGirl, Woman, Other · Hamish Hamilton, 2019
with Bernardine Evaristo — Novelist & professor
Booker Prize, 2019
Evaristo performs three of the twelve narrators of Girl, Woman, Other and explains where the punctuation went.
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Recently recorded
1 events on the road so far this year.
In conversationPast eventHalf of a Yellow Sun · Fourth Estate, 2006
with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Novelist & essayist
Women's Prize for Fiction, 2007
A small online session: one chapter read aloud, then half an hour of questions in the chat.
The archive
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Women's Prize for Fiction, 2007
Kazuo Ishiguro
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2017
Margaret Atwood
Booker Prize, 2000
Colson Whitehead
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017
Every shelf, every continent
81 genres across 8 families, and authors from 6 regions of the world — literary fiction to romantasy, poetry to true crime, and plenty in translation.
The novels that get taught, argued over and re-read a decade later.
Writers who move one rule of reality and follow the consequences honestly.
Plot as engineering: what the reader knows, when, and what it costs them.
The most demanding structure in publishing, and the least respected.
Research, argument and the discipline of getting the facts to sing.
Where every writer we interview says they learned to hear a line.
Harder than adult fiction: no reader is more willing to close the book.
Roughly a third of our episodes are with writers read first in another language.
Featured authors
Novelist & essayist
Half of a Yellow Sun · Americanah · Purple Hibiscus
Read bioNovelist, Nobel laureate
The Remains of the Day · Never Let Me Go · Klara and the Sun
Read bio
Novelist, Nobel laureate
Flights · Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead · The Books of Jacob
Read bio
Poet & novelist
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous · Night Sky with Exit Wounds · Time Is a Mother
Read bio
What listeners say
“The only interview show where authors actually talk about the work instead of the press tour. I re-listen to episodes while drafting.”
“I've recommended this podcast to every student in my workshop. It's a masterclass disguised as a conversation.”
“Nora asks the question every writer is too embarrassed to ask out loud. Essential listening.”
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