No guest this month (don’t worry, we’ve got more fantastic people starting again in January), but in this Xmas ’18 special edition Lochlan and Jaimie get tanked up on port and mince pies and conduct a brief dissection of how the first year of Unsound Methods has gone as well as a review of what they’ve learnt before getting stuck in to a couple of most commonly quoted lists of writing advice from Messers Vonnegut and Orwell. Full of the Christmas spirit, this episode contains many, many swears… Thank you to all of our listeners for a great first year, see you in 2019.
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Tom Lee
This month we speak to Tom Lee award-winning short fiction writer and author of The Alarming Palsy of James Orr. We talk about Tom’s approach to writing and how he finds new ideas, the impact of ill-health on his writing as well as the difficulties in moving from short stories to longer form fiction. Tom’s work has appeared in The Sunday Times, Esquire and Prospect in the UK, The Dublin Review in Ireland and in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope All Story in the United States, among others. In 2012 he was shortlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the largest prize for a single short story…
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Lars Iyer
In this month’s episode we speak to Lars Iyer, weaver of fiction in blog-form, novelist and erstwhile philosopher. Among many other things we talked to Lars about turning blogs into novels (as he did with his first three novels ‘Spurious’, ‘Dogma’ and ‘Exodus’), his path to being a serial producer of trilogies and making the most of your spouse as your first reader and editor. Post-interview, Lars confirmed for us that ‘Nietzsche in the Burbs’ will be coming out next year on Melville House. You can follow Lars on Twitter: @UtterlySpurious – he also wrote an interesting piece for the White Review on the health of the contemporary novel in 2011, which…
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Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
Welcome to the second series of Unsound Methods. In this episode we speak to Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, the author of Call Me Zebra from Alma Books (in the UK). Azareen’s debut novel was Fra Keeler. Topics covered in our chat included research, working with editors and the paths that reading can take while putting a novel together. Thanks to Burley Fisher bookshop for providing us with the recording space for this episode. You can find Call Me Zebra here: https://almabooks.com/product/call-me-zebra/ And follow Azareen on twitter: @avandervliet Follow us @unsoundmethods or unsoundmethods.co.uk
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Beyond Words: Noémi Lefebvre & Eimear McBride
This episode was recorded at the Beyond Words Festival at the Institut Francais on Thursday 17th May 2018. We sat down with Noémi Lefebvre, the author of ‘Blue Self-Portrait’ (available from Les Fugitives: http://www.lesfugitives.com/books/#/blue-self-portrait/) and Eimear McBride, author of ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’ (Galley Beggar Press/Faber) and ‘The Lesser Bohemians’ (Faber). It was hot, and there was a lot of noise in the street, so the sound is not 100%, but we found it very interesting to speak to both writers about the similarities and differences in their approaches. We caught Noémi and Eimear just before they went on stage, so this is a brief chat. At times…
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Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft
This week we speak to Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft, joint winners of the Man Booker International prize 2018 for the translated version of Olga’s book Bieguni (Flights) We caught up with Olga and Jennifer two days after their win and discuss the whirlwind of prize-winning, composing constellation novels, suppressing your first published book, and the challenges of translating fiction. The superb ‘Flights’; is out now on @FitzcarraldoEds – https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/flights You can find Jennifer on twitter: @jenniferlcroft Photo credit: Janie Airey
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Joanna Kavenna
In this week’s episode we speak to novelist and essayist, Joanna Kavenna. We talk about false starts, finding a narrative voice in fiction, researching a novel in the Arctic circle and dealing with Polar Bears, how literature can help us understand and limit technology before the machines destroy us and why we all need to take a more Wittgensteinian view of reality. Joanna is the author of the Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule and A Field Guide to Reality (riverrun, 2016) as well as three other novels and non-fiction essays. Find out more about Joanna at joannakavenna.com Photo credit: A Michaelis Follow us @unsoundmethods or unsoundmethods.co.uk. If you enjoy this or other episodes…
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Patrick Langley
This week we speak to Patrick Langley, author of Arkady from Fitzcarraldo Editions. With a background in art criticism and radio production, Paddy talks to us about drafting and structuring a work, finding inspiration from the urban backwaters of London and the problem with building elaborate memory palaces… You can find Arkady here: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/arkady And follow Paddy on twitter: twitter.com/PaddyLangley
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Will Eaves
This week we speak to novelist, poet and teacher, Will Eaves. Will was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1995 to 2011 and his work has been short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry and the BBC National Short Story Award. We discuss his approach to structuring a novel, turning notes into a finished work, working with a small press and capturing the dream-like state of the unconscious in prose. Most recently he is author of the Murmur from CB Editions as well as: The Oversight (Picador, 2001) Nothing To Be Afraid Of (Picador, 2005) Sound Houses (Carcanet, 2011) This Is Paradise (Picador, 2012) The Absent Therapist (CB Editions, 2014) The Inevitable Gift…
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Daniel Levin Becker
Something slightly different this week, as we speak to Daniel Levin Becker, member of the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘Workshop for potential literature’) Daniel doesn’t consider himself primarily a fiction writer, but as a life-long member of the OuLiPo he is in the company (spiritually if not temporally) of writers such as Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Daniel talks to us about the attraction of writing with constraints, his journey to France and the Oulipo and gives us a flavour of how the group operates (including a membership cancellation policy that Mark Zuckerberg can only dream of). Daniel is the author of ‘Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of…
