‘The way I write in general is basically just to move, in as a quiet-minded a manner as I can, toward what I feel as heat.’
An interview with the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.
‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.
‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’
‘I’ve been dreaming wildly in lockdown. Have you?’
‘I can’t fathom being interested in writing without the excitement of the possibility of the sentence.’
‘Things that we love, things that we hate – we need to crack it open.’
‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’ Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.
‘I think the infrastructure of community around fathering is very limited.’ We discuss Caleb Klaces’s debut novel, Fatherhood.
‘Imagine if an alien came to earth and asked, so how to you reproduce?’We discuss Blue Ticket and the body horror of motherhood.
‘Unless you are completely shut down and in denial, there’s no way you’re getting out of this without having changed.’ Ottessa Moshfegh on 2020 and her new novel.
We discuss the dilemmas presented by her new memoir, In the Dream House. ‘What does it mean to present a face of one’s community that isn’t commonly seen, and that might be seen as bad PR?’
We discuss her collection, Doing the Most with the Least, on the Granta Podcast.‘don’t be / shocked when I say I was in prison you’re still in prison that’s / what this land means prison.’
We discuss her new book, Weather, on the Granta Podcast.‘Yes, it's dire. Yes, we're not sure what to do. Does that mean we have nothing to do?’
