Sarah Hall | Podcast

Sarah Hall & Saskia Vogel

Sarah Hall speaks to Saskia Vogel about wolves, tattoos and the wilds of Cumbria.

In our latest installment of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, we speak to Sarah Hall. Hall was born in Cumbria and lives in Norwich. She is the multiple-prize-winning author of four novels: Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army (published in the US as Daughters of the North) and How to Paint a Dead Man; a collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, original radio dramas and poetry. Here she spoke to Granta’s Saskia Vogel about wolves, tattoos and the wilds of Cumbria.

Photograph by Nadav Kander

In Conversation

The Online Edition

16th May 2013

In Conversation

The Online Edition

16th May 2013

Top Reads 2021

Faith

‘It’s no good joining an existing cult, you have to start one yourself.’

A short story by Japanese author Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who also brought us Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings.

Have You Met Husband?

‘The oysters were her idea, a way of catching me off guard. I accidentally said yes.’

A story by Amy Silverberg.

Lice

‘I often had head lice as a child.’

Memoir by A.K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches.

A Bleed of Blue

‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’

On love, its absence and Joni Mitchell’s Blue album.

Up Late

‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’

Nick Laird’s elegy for his father, Alastair Laird, who died of Covid-19.

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of five novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently the only author to be four times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.

More about the author →

Saskia Vogel

Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission, her debut novel, about love, loss and BDSM, was published in four languages in 2019. She has translated leading Swedish authors such as Lina Wolff, Karolina Ramqvist, Johannes Anyuru, and Katrine Marcal, whose Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is published by Portobello Books. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Guernica, the White Review, the Offing, Paris Review Daily, LitHub and Two Lines. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s publicist.

Photograph © Fette Sans

More about the author →