We opened this Autumn season with Daisy Johnson and followed up with Judith Vanistendael and Scott Jacobs. We'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo over the next week or so, but this episode is devoted to Hannah Webb and her short story Titanic. While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists tha…

This season we've already heard from Daisy Johnson and Judith Vanistendael. Over the next few weeks we'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo and Hannah Webb, but this time we welcome Scott Jacobs and his short story Be Careful Who Your Friends Are. According to Jacobs, this curious tale was a "real-life experience". "I changed the names, to p…

In the first of our Autumn podcasts, Daisy Johnson told us how she was living on the edge when she was writing her collection The Hotel, and read from her short story Conference. Over the course of this season we'll be ranging all round the world to hear from Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but this time Judith Vanistendael expla…

The leaves are swirling, there's a nip in the air, so it's time for a whole new bunch of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Judith Vanistendael, Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but we're launching into Autumn with Daisy Johnson and her short story Conference. Conference appears in Johnson's forthc…

This Summer podcast series has brought us Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck – translated by Ellen Jones – and Jack Klausner. We bring it to a close with Susan Muaddi Darraj and her mighty story May You Wake Up to a Homeland. Darraj tells us that she started with an image, an old man in his kitchen "looking at this bizarre package of fro…

Already this summer we've heard from Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones. This time we're getting under the surface of Jack Klausner's short story The Coalface. Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea…

This summer series has already brought us Samantha Harvey and Patrick Cash. Now it's time for Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones, with Bruck's short story China. We start with questions of vocabulary, as Bruck clears up exactly what a china is and fills us in on the cultural significance of the gaucho. The author says she was writing aga…

Last time Samantha Harvey let the cat out of the bag, diving straight into the heart of her story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. This time Patrick Cash is a little less spoiler heavy as he talks about and reads from his story Trish Malone. Cash tells us how the cabaret artist who takes a leading role came to his rescue a few years back and has been "wande…

The weather may be up the spout but it's still summer, so it's time for another batch of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Susan Muaddi Darraj, Carolina Bruck, Patrick Cash and Jack Klausner in this summer season. But Summer opens with Samantha Harvey and her mighty short story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. If you haven't read it already, you m…

In this Spring series of podcasts we've heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. We bring it to a close with Jakub Żulczyk and his story Many Years of Hardships, translated by John and Małgorzata Markoff. Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Light…

This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister? Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, …

In this Spring series of podcasts we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck and Grahame Williams. Now it's time for Lauren Caroline Smith and her short story The Placing of Hands. Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a pr…

Last time we heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, who told us that before her latest novel Kairos she'd "never written a love story". This time we welcome Grahame Williams and his short story Making It Happen. Like the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, an inspirational figure in Making It Happen, Williams says he's not much of a planner: "If there's a sp…

Spring has finally sprung and with it another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. But we launch into Spring with Jenny Erpenbeck and her haunting short story Sloughing Off One Skin. When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck bega…

We've already heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack. and Robert Neuwirth in this Winter series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Liam Hogan and his short story Backstory. Hogan tells us how it all came from his suspicion of heroes. "They often have it far too easy," he explains. "If you have someone with supreme ski…

In this Winter series of podcasts we've heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth and Ariel Marken Jack. This time we welcome Robert Neuwirth and his short story The Disambiguation. Neuwirth tells us how his story started from a couple of one-liners that were driving him crazy and wound up stuffed full of computer code. We anthropomorphise the machi…

We've already heard from Linda Mannheim and Richard Smyth in this Winter series, and now it's time for Ariel Marken Jack and their story The Bread Boy. Marken Jack tells us how their writing began in isolation, flat on their back with chronic fatigue syndrome. This debilitating illness is giving rise to writing they call "the most 21st-century form…

Last week we heard from Linda Mannheim, who told us that the only way she can go back to the neighbourhood where she grew up is in fiction. This time we welcome Richard Smyth and his short story Karóly Bálint's Metaphor. Smyth explains how his story isn’t exactly set in Budapest and reflects on how the bleakness of the steppe echoes the stereotypic…

In this Winter series of podcasts, we'll be hearing from Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack, Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan. We start off with Linda Mannheim, who joined us down the line from Berlin. Mannheim explains how the central character in her story Those Last Days appeared to her "out of the blue" and how she found her fiction inexorably draw…

We've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie and Shauna Mackay on the Fictionable podcast. Now we bring this autumn series to a close with Catriona Bolt and her mycological short story Bloom. Bolt tells us how she fell in love with mushrooms despite, or perhaps because of, their double nature. These mysterious organism…

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."…

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…

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…

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 …

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 addre…

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 …

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 …

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 a…

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…

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 attri…

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…

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…

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 Sum…