Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

Iris Mwanza - Zambia, Human Rights, and Elections

"I think it's a story few people have told before. And it's really about, what does a defender of human rights look like?"

Iris Mwanza is here to talk about her novel, THE LION'S DEN (Canongate Books). Iris's novel is about a human rights lawyer, Grace Zulu, whose client Willbess ‘Bessy’ Mulenga,  dark who has been arrested for offences ‘against nature. It launches Grace, and Iris, into  the dark underbelly of the legal system.

Iris is deputy director of the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she leads strategy and investment for the Women in Leadership portfolio, and she has previously worked as a corporate lawyer in both Zambia and the US.

Rippling Points

01.35 - Recording on the morning of the American election
02.41 - Who are the main characters
05.45 - Public institutions, the global south and colonialism
08.59 - When iris saw the system for what it was
11.17 - ‘True believers’ who inspired this novel
13.41 - Why grace is the way she is
16.09 - Grace's clashes write father Sebastian
21.27 - Guilt
26.10 - The tragedy of Bessy’s case
28.01 - Challenges promoting the book in Zambia
30.23 - Writing the court room

Friða Ísberg and THE MARK

“The book is me trying to have a conversation with my father and reach a middle ground.”

 

Friða Ísberg is here to talk about THE MARK (Faber and Faber) translated by Larissa Kyzer. The book centres on a referendum in Iceland about whether mandatory tests should be imposed on its citizens. Friða talks about writing over the divide, arguments with her father, and Icelandic literary culture and how they have all shaped the book. 

Rippling Points

02:05 - what is the mark?

04:12 - where are the divides?

06:30 - working in London while Brexit happened

08:07 - Frida's relationship with her dad and how it informed The Mark

11.15 - feeding emotion into a novel

13:46 - is it easier to write characters we agree with?

18:31 - Icelandic meaning of The Mark and how it relates to divides.

21:25 - why an empathy test?

25.51 - who is profiting from the mark?

28:30 - is one in ten a published writer in Iceland?

31:22 - do writers have a public duty?

Reference Points

Writers

Fernanda Melchor
Jacqueline Rose
George Saunders
Ali Smith

Films

There's Something About Mary (1998, dir: Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

 

 

Naomi Wood and THIS IS WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS

“Some people have been, oh these women are so grotesque. I don’t think they are! They’re quite relatable.”

 

Naomi Wood joins me to discuss THIS IS WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS (Published by Orion)

It’s a collection that features the BBC Short Story Prize winner, Comorbidities. We talk about different kinds of intimacy in the stories, and how or why Naomi often writes about mothers in the . Naomi also talks about the craft and how she clashed registers to dazzling effect.

Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. As a novelist, her books have won a Jerwood Award, the British Library Hay Festival Prize, and been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Historical Writers Golden Crown. Mrs. Hemingway was a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick in 2014 and a Chanel Bookclub pick in 2023.

 

for details about Naomi’s short fiction course, visit www.naomiwood.com

Rippling Points

1.45- comorbidities and winning the bbc short story prize award 

5.34 - pie charts’

8.17 - on writing about mothers

10.29 - transgressive actions in characters

12.07 - complicated or bad? 

15.48 - what’s a register clash?

18.54 - are they healing?

23,20 - influence of the pandemic and previous novels 

27.30 - what do we do with old me?

29.04 - what’s next for Naomi?

 

Reference Points

Rachel Cusk

Yan Ge

Ernest Hemingway 

 

Elizabeth Morris’ Crib Notes: https://cribnotesbookclub.substack.com

Sam Sax and YR DEAD

"I think their experience in the bookstore is trying to think literary inheritance and spiritual and intellectual experience."

Sam sax is here to discuss YR DEAD, their debut novel about Ezra, a queer, non-binary 27-year-old of Jewish heritage, whose life we see in fragments and flashbacks when they self-immolate outside trump tower.

We talk about qualities of wandering, the multiplicities of Jewish identities, and what second hand bookstores can tell us about legacies and life.

Sam's PIG was named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets

YR DEAD is published by McSweeney's in the US and Daunt Books in the UK

Reference Points 

01.30 - who is Ezra

02.20 - is Ezra a flaneur?

04.53 - why the novel is set on this day

06.28 - the multiplicity of Jewish identity

09.40 - how death or organises or doesn’t organise the novel

15:00 different desires

19:20 - Ezra’s mother and her absence

24.25 - second hand bookshops and legacies

29.00 - the hopeful message of Sam’s novel

Reference Points

Hervé Guibert
Andrea Lawlor
Virginia Woolf

Jennifer Lucy Allan and CLAY: A HUMAN HISTORY

"I'd done a lot of clay-making...you can spend a lifetime and only get good at one technique!"

Jennifer Lucy Allan joins me to talk about her second book, CLAY: A HUMAN HISTORY (White Rabbit Books). After Jennifer's exploration and writing about sound in The Foghorn's Lament (White Rabbit Books), Jennifer has, quite literally, turned her hand to a more physical and enduring substance in clay. From Japanese Tea Ceremonies, to humans making their own image, to life on Mars, clay is seemingly everywhere. Jennifer is also a presenter on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. 


Rippling Points

1.20 - How Jennifer’s early experience with clay led to her enchantment of it and then writing this boundless history

6.04 - How the book on clay differs to Jennifer’s previous book on foghorns

10.30 - Ephemerality of sound and permanence of clay - the writing challenges.


13.40 - Clay: its history compared with human history

15:15 - Who is Marija Gimbutas, and why is she important

21:15 - Language and touch

24.40 - Climate change and how it's revealing more about clay

28.00 - How clay becomes an object


Reference Points

Marija Gimbutas.
Ladi Kwali
Maria Martinez

 

 

Bruce Omar Yates and The Muslim Cowboy

"This book is begging to be written...It has this a frontier-ness to it..."

Bruce Omar Yates is here to discuss his upcoming novel published by Dead Ink Books, THE MUSLIM COWBOY . 

In a contemporary and entertaining novel set in aftermath of the Iraq war, a man who is obsessed with old Western movies dresses in double denim and roams a lawless landscape in search of his own Western story. 

Rippling Points

1.32 - Bruce's family and how these fed into ideas about a 'muslim cowboy'
4.30 - Nameless and speechless: playing with the archetype of the cowboy
6.20 - Song writing in Nashville to writing this novel
8.40 - Iraq as the setting for the novel
12.00 - Removing binaries around what is good and not good
17.33 - A camel and child - the other characters
20.53 - The novel as a sandbox
25.30 - The act of making his characters watch westerns

Reference Points

Aladdin (1992. Dir: John Musker and Ron Clements)
David Foster Wallace
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes 
Lucky Luke - Goscinny
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969. Dir: Sergio Leone)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Shane (1953. Dir: George Stevens)
True Grit (1969. Dir: Henry Hathaway)
Zadie Smith