One of the joyous things that has come out of this project is the way that I’m frequently invited to take part in discussions about writing and the ways stories travel. Often, these conversations take place at literary festivals or conferences, but they sometimes involve podcasts too.
Last year, I was asked to produce a new podcast for the Royal Literary Fund, a UK charity that has supported professional writers for more than 200 years and with which I’ve been involved since 2017. Over the preceding decade, the RLF had built a sound archive featuring recordings of hundreds of writers talking about the creative process, and the challenge and joys of putting words on the page. Now the team wanted a new format to bring this rich bank of material to a wider audience.
The Collected podcast is the result. Built around clips from the RLF archive, the episodes bring special guests into conversation with those recorded voices. Hosted by a brilliant team of presenters, including South Asia Speaks founder Sonia Faleiro, award-winning poet Julia Copus, and musician and crime writer Doug Johnstone, the conversations present a lively, funny, surprising and often moving account of what it means to be a writer in the early twenty-first century. The aim is to offer a more nuanced picture than we often see in the media, and it’s been wonderful to hear guests including Women’s Prize founder Kate Mosse, crime writer Howard Linskey, and visual artist and poet Ella Frears embracing the concept with warmth and frankness.
Although the writers RLF supports are UK-based, it’s been a joy to reflect my interest in international storytelling in the line-up too. Examples include discussions with Kerala-born novelist Deepa Anappara, who talks thought-provokingly about the gap between the expectations of mainstream anglophone publishers and the sort of writing that interests her, and Colin Grant, director of RLF’s WritersMosaic platform for writers of the global majority, who draws on his Caribbean heritage in his writing on race and migration.
Collected is available on all the usual platforms. I’d love to know what you think.