Liam Bishop curating the best writers to help you with your writing
Episodes
Feb 19, 2026
Feb 19, 2026
39 min
I’m looking forward to diving into the crumbling and the haunted this week with Leon Craig.
We’re discussing Leon Craig’s THE DECADENCE.
And you the listener picked Leon as one of the rising stars of literature that you wanted me to interview.
Have you ever walked past an old abandoned house and wondered what kinds of lives were lived there? Have you ever dared to explore one? Perhaps you wanted to escape and hide in the house. Or perhaps you wanted to use it for something a little more nefarious.
Leon Craig, whose previous collection of short stories, PARALLEL HELLS, was also published by Sceptre, is a graduate of the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by Hazlitt, the Sunday Times, the London Magazine and others and is forthcoming in Nulla magazine and Berlin Babel anthology.
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Episode Chapters
1.30 - rising literary stars poll
3.30 - The crumbling haunted house
6.30 - the ensemble cast
7.25 - early hauntings.
10.10 - misunderstandings and humour
11.50 -embracing imperfect characters.
14.25 - secret passageways
16.05 - sexual elements to hauntings.
19.10 - colonial legacies and trespassing
22.55 - Rippling Pages Patreon
24.20 - on beauty
27.00 - getting what we want.
29.50 - desire and disgust
32.00 - The country housegenre
37.15 - Leon’s next novel
Reference Points
House of Leaves (2000, Mark Z. Danielewski).
Saltburn (2023, dir. Emerald Fennell)
Beowulf
The Great Gatsby (1925, F.Scott Fitzgerald)
White is for Witching(2009, Helen Oyeyemi)
Brideshead Revisited (1945, Evelyn Waugh)
Feb 5, 2026
Feb 5, 2026
37 min
We’re going to the Slovenian coast this week during the final years Yugoslavia with Ana Schnabl.
Dunja has finally launched her literary career, but the shadow and spectre of her brother’s death haunts both her and her family. What happens when she returns to investigate her brother’s death? And what happens when the truth becomes stranger than the fiction she writes?
Ana Schnabl’s novel is published by Divided Publishing. Ana is a Slovenian writer, and this is her second novel to be translated into English, by Rawley Grau. Her first novel to be translated into English was The Masterpiece, that time by David Limon. In Slovenia, she is a winner of Slovenia’s prestigious literary prize, the Kresnik award. She’s also a regular contributor to the journal The Guardian, writing on Balkan politics and culture.
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Episode Chapters
1.30 - Ana's based in Slovenia
2.35 - Fake crime novels
3.50 - Djuna's relationship with her dead brother.
5.30 - Why has Djuna returned?
7.30 - Family dynamics.
9.00 - Rockstars and the Slovene transition
10.35 - Michael Jackson
13.30 - a fake crime novel
15.00 - Rippling Pages Bookshop
16.00 - Not liking modernist novels
19.45 - Writing cerebral characters
21.00 - Sentimental feelings about home
24.15 - Ice cream and the Adriatic coast
27.30 - Not believing in legacies.
30.30 sitting with unpleasant people.
31.50 - who helps Djuna.
33.45 - Smoking
Reference Points
Agatha Christie
Marcel Proust
Virginia Woolf
Jan 22, 2026
Jan 22, 2026
37 min
What a lovely time I had speaking and sitting with Eva Meijer, the Dutch Author, in Leeds to discuss their novel SEA NOW.
A government who seems slow to respond to a rapidly encroaching crisis. Marketing executives exploiting ways to make quick cash. A missing Prime Minister. Leavers and remainers conflicted about the right course of action. It all sounds like a playbook for our recent political crises. But when the dams start bursting in the Netherlands and the country rapidly begins to flood and be subsumed, what happens when people are faced with the unthinkable in this new waterworld.
These are the questions at the heart of Eva Meijer’s, SEA NOW, translated by Anne Thompson Melo, and published by Peirene Press.
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Chapters
2.25 - what is the novel about
4.25 - a human and animal story
7:45 - how people respond to the crisis in the book
11.15 - is the novel represent human experience
13.45 - widescreen viewpoints
17.45 - why is the sea so powerful
21.20 - the Rippling Pages Bookshop
23.10 - why do characters stay?
25.40 - is there hope in the novel
27.15 - endings and new beginnings and grief
30.30 - objects of influence
36.40 - Patreon subscriber shoutout!
Reference Points
Don DeLillo
Jan 8, 2026
Jan 8, 2026
12 min
Happy New Year!
I’m delighted to bring you some more unedited and bonus content from my Christmas and New Year special with Madeleine Dunnigan and Farah Ali. There was just so much good stuff in our craft and curation special, that I wanted to bring you a little more to start the year.
These books are going to be spoken about in literary circles in January.
In Pakistan, a young woman grapples with a strange, indefinable illness against a backdrop of political upheaval. In England, a teenager tries to make sense of his intense emotions during one hot summer at boarding school.
Farah Ali’s TELEGRAPHY, published by CB Editions, is her second novel. Originally from Pakistan, Farah has been anthologised for the Pushcart Prize and is the reviews editor at Wasafiri.
JEAN is the debut novel by London-based writer Madeleine Dunnigan, published by Daunt Books. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA programme at New York University.
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Reference Points
Tom McCarthy
John McGahern
Gerald Murnane
Dec 18, 2025
Dec 18, 2025
49 min
I’m kicking off a 2026 preview with two of the most exciting emerging voices publishing books this January. I speak to them about how they wrote their novels, before asking which books inspired them along the way, and what their books and book selections say about the world today.
If you’re looking for your next great reads of 2026, look no further — Rippling Pages has you covered.
We’re going from Pakistan to a rural boarding school in 1970s London.
In Pakistan, a young woman grapples with a strange, indefinable illness against a backdrop of political upheaval. In England, a teenager tries to make sense of his intense emotions during one hot summer at boarding school.
Farah Ali’s TELEGRAPHY, published by CB Editions, is her second novel. Originally from Pakistan, Farah has been anthologised for the Pushcart Prize and is the reviews editor at Wasafiri.
JEAN is the debut novel by London-based writer Madeleine Dunnigan, published by Daunt Books. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA programme at New York University.
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Reference Points
Mathias Énard - The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild
Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers
John McGahern - That They May Face the Rising Sun
Gerald Murnane - The Plains
Tom McCarthy - Remainder
Chapters
3.15 - illness and narrative voice
5.25 - feeling ill writing the book
10.15 - Madeleine's on Farah's narrator
12.30 - Madeleine's book
16.10 - different kinds of love.
18.40 - Rippling Pages patreon
19.55 - a queer story in the boarding school
21.50 - different kinds of intimacy
23.40 - precociousness
28.10 - bodies, illness and healing
33.00 - what these books say about the world.
38.00 - Dealing with fracture
40.50 - rippling pages bookshop
41.20 - Madeleine recommends
45.15 - Farah recommends.
Dec 6, 2025
Dec 6, 2025
22 min
I'm delighted to be talking to Rali Chorbadzhiyska about her work as freelance editor, and we're asking what the road to publication really looks like.
It must be another edition of Ask the Curator. In these episodes, we go behind the curtain of the literary industry to ask another literary curator, how they do what they do.
Over the years, Rali has worked at Penguin RandomHouse, Faber and Canongate, working with some of the biggest names in literature. But she recently went freelance to deliver on her aim of guiding writers refine and elevate their work. She was awarded with a Rising Star Award from The Printing Charity in recognition of her work.
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Links to Rali’s services:
Reference Points
Farah Ali
Raymond Carver
V.S. Naipaul
Erin Sommers
Chapters
2.25 - what does Rali's work look like?
3.45 - Rali's ideal clients
4.50 - the importance of taking feedback
7.15 - strategies for taking and rejecting feedback
12.00 - finding people who champion you
15.20 - Do writers need to market themselves?
16.10 - Having ties to local communities.
17.40 - Rali’s top tip
19.40 - books Rali is looking forward to in 2026