Meet the Writers - Radio | Monocle

Cover art for
C

Culture / Podcast

Meet the Writers

Want to know more about the authors behind your favourite books? Tune in to discover the methods of – and inspiration behind – some of the world’s most exciting writers. Every Sunday, Georgina Godwin hosts an in-depth discussion with the person behind the prose.

RSS Feed
436

Latest episode

Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka:

Nairobi-based nonprofit Book Bunk, the brainchild of Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka, restores existing public libraries and installs new libraries in public spaces. Its flagship project in the Kenyan capital is the McMillan Memorial Library, which opened in 1931 but it was segregated only for the use of white people until 1962. Book Bunk’s founders imagine that the almost 50,000 public libraries in Kenya can be steered to become more than just repositories, acting as sites of knowledge production, shared experiences, cultural leadership and information exchange; they see them as sites of heritage, public art and memory.

Latest episodes

EpisodeDateDescriptionDownloadPlay
43624 Mar 2024
27 min

Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka 

Nairobi-based nonprofit Book Bunk, the brainchild of Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka, restores existing public libraries and installs new libraries in public spaces. Its flagship project in the Kenyan capital is the McMillan Memorial Library, which opened in 1931 but it was segregated only for the use of white people until 1962. Book Bunk’s founders imagine that the almost 50,000 public libraries in Kenya can be steered to become more than just repositories, acting as sites of knowledge production, shared experiences, cultural leadership and information exchange; they see them as sites of heritage, public art and memory.

DownloadPlay
43517 Mar 2024
28 min

Helen Russell 

UK author and journalist Helen Russell left her job in London as editor of Marie Clare and relocated to Jutland, Denmark, with her husband in 2013. What initially set out to be a year-long trip quickly turned into a decade. Her freelance career had seen her work as Scandinavia correspondent for ‘The Guardian’, write for publications such as ‘The Observer’, ‘Stylist’ and ‘Grazia’, and publish six books including ‘The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country’, which became an international bestseller and was translated into 21 languages. Her latest book, ‘How to Raise a Viking’ uncovers the secrets to parenting the world’s happiest children.

DownloadPlay
43410 Mar 2024
26 min

Denise Dorrance 

US cartoonist and illustrator, Denise Dorrance’s sharp, satirical work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers such as the ‘The Spectator’ and ‘The Sunday Times’. Her debut graphic novel, ‘Polar Vortex’, has been celebrated by the likes of Oprah Winfrey. She is best known for her character Mimi, a self-involved fashionista in dark sunglasses, typically drawn with a glass of wine in one hand and an unnamed infant in the other, which ran as a weekly cartoon in ‘The Mail on Sunday’. In this interview she opens up about what led her to write her autobiographical illustrated story, how she engages with genre and how she adapted her artistic process to develop her poignant story of grief and mortality in her hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

DownloadPlay
4333 Mar 2024
25 min

Jane Cholmeley 

Jane Cholmeley co-founded and opened the feminist Silver Moon Bookshop in London during the Thatcher era to promote the work of female authors. It quickly came to play a vital role in the second-wave feminist movement. Operating in a male-dominated space, the stop was often subject to threats of arson but maintained a safe space for customers, with community activism at its core. The bookshop frequently hosted writers such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Margaret Attwood. Cholmeley has recorded the cop’s 17-year history in her new book ‘A Bookshop of One’s Own.’

DownloadPlay
43225 Feb 2024
26 min

Tabitha Lasley 

It was the end of a relationship in London that led Tabitha Lasley to pack her bags, leave her journalism job and move to Aberdeen, Scotland, to pursue a story that she’d been sitting on for years. She grew up on the Wirral in northwest England, a place frequented by the men who worked on oil rigs in the Irish Sea. She initially set out to write an objective view of life on the rig but an encounter with one oil-rig worker in the North Sea set her on a different path. ‘Sea State’ is a captivating memoir that chronicles both her own breakdown and the breakdown of a way of life for the men working in the industry.

DownloadPlay
43118 Feb 2024
27 min

Michael Cunningham 

American novelist and screenwriter Michael Cunningham is best known for his 1998 novel ‘The Hours’, which became a ‘New York Times’ bestseller and won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘The Best American Short Stories’, and he has worked as a creative writing lecturer at Yale University for the past 16 years. At the heart of his novels and short stories is a preoccupation with the human condition, whether through the intense experiences of love, loss or heartbreak. ‘Day’, his first novel in almost a decade, explores such themes through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic.

DownloadPlay
43011 Feb 2024
28 min

Alice Haddon and Ruth Field 

In 2020, Alice Haddon and Ruth Field came together to develop an alternative offering to the traditional 50-minute therapy session, which became a wellness retreat designed for women known as The Heartbreak Hotel. Alice is a licensed counselling psychologist with more than 25 years of experience in private and public practice. Her writing has been featured in ‘The Times’, ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ and HuffPost. Ruth is a former criminal barrister who began life-coaching and has written multiple self-help books. Now, in 2024, they have used their expertise from decades of writing and helping others to co-author a non-fiction work inspired by their real life retreat. ‘Finding Your Self at the Heartbreak Hotel’ provides readers with therapeutic tools to help find confidence and overcome rumination.

DownloadPlay
4294 Feb 2024
28 min

Paul Caruana Galizia 

After his mother was killed by a car bomb in 2017, Paul Caruana Galizia became a journalist and has since won several honours and awards for his reporting, including the Orwell Prize special award. The assassination of his mother Daphne Caruana Galizia – a Maltese journalist and anti-corruption activist best known for her investigation of the Panama Papers – and subsequent investigation, is the subject of his book ‘A Death in Malta: An assassination and family’s quest for justice.’

DownloadPlay
42828 Jan 2024
29 min

Daisy Goodwin 

UK screenwriter, TV producer and novelist, Daisy Goodwin has written the bestsellers ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘The Fortune Hunter’ and ‘Victoria’, as well as eight poetry anthologies, including ‘101 Poems That Could Save Your Life: An Anthology of Emotional First Aid’. During her 25 years working as a TV producer, she created and produced shows such as ‘Grand Designs’ and ‘Escape to the Country’. Her latest book, ‘Diva’, is based on the life of legendary opera singer Maria Callas.

DownloadPlay
42721 Jan 2024
26 min

Maureen Freely 

US journalist, novelist, translator and professor Maureen Freely joins Georgina Godwin in the studio. She is best known as the translator of Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s work. Freely has also written ‘The Life of the Party’, set in Turkey, and ‘The Other Rebecca’, a contemporary take on Daphne du Maurier’s classic 1930s novel. Her latest book, ‘My Blue Peninsula’, is set in Istanbul, where she spent her childhood.

DownloadPlay
42614 Jan 2024
27 min

Cat Bohannon 

American researcher, scholar, writer and poet Cat Bohannon speaks to Georgina Godwin about her debut book, ‘Eve’, a whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era and recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its centre. She completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition and once worked as an unofficial poet in residence for Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination, in Dalian, China.

DownloadPlay
4257 Jan 2024
30 min

The best of 2023: Lydia Sandgren 

To welcome in the new year, we look back at one of our favourite conversations from 2023, with Lydia Sandgren. The Swedish psychologist and author spent 10 years writing her debut novel, which won the prestigious August Prize in 2020 and sold more than 100,000 copies. She joins Georgina Godwin to mark the publication in English of ‘Collected Works’, an epic family drama about a man dealing with the tragic aftermath of his wife’s disappearance a decade ago.

DownloadPlay
42431 Dec 2023
24 min

The best of 2023: Calder Walton 

We listen back to one of our favourite conversations from 2023. Calder Walton, a historian of global security, speaks to Georgina Godwin about what secret archives and interviews with former agents can tell us about the century-long secret intelligence war between Russia and the West.

DownloadPlay
42324 Dec 2023
25 min

Louise Doughty 

English novelist and screenwriter Louise Doughty joins Georgina Godwin in the studio. Doughty is the author of 10 novels, including ‘Platform Seven’, recently filmed for ITV, and the bestseller ‘Apple Tree Yard’, adapted for BBC One. She also wrote and created the hit 2022 BBC drama ‘Crossfire’. Her latest novel, ‘A Bird in Winter’, was published earlier this year.

DownloadPlay
42217 Dec 2023
32 min

Michel Faber and Caspar Henderson 

Georgina Godwin is joined by two authors who are both on a quest to find new ways to listen – and they invite you to do the same. Dutch-born writer Michel Faber has written several works of fiction including ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’. His first non-fiction book, ‘Listen: On Music, Sound and Us’ explores how psychological pressure influences musical taste. Author and science journalist Caspar Henderson’s ‘A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous’, shows us how we can become re-enchanted by the sounds around us, from the everyday to the celestial.

DownloadPlay

/

sign in to monocle

new to monocle?

Subscriptions start from £120.

Subscribe now

Loading...

/

15

15

Live
Monocle Radio

00:0001:00

  • Monocle on Culture650