It’s a wonderful award season for Myriad, as our heartfelt congratulations go to authors Lisa Allen-Agostini, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, Sabba Khan and Zara Slattery whose books are currently shortlisted for several prizes. Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread The Devil Knead has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, while Yvonne Bailey-Smith’s The Day I Fell Off My Island is shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and for the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday Memorial Prize for writers whose debut fiction has been published at the age of 60 or over. Sabba Khan’s The Roles We Play is shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize for book of the year for a British writer of colour, and Zara Slattery’s COMA has been selected for the inaugural Graphic Medicine Award. We wish you all the best of luck!
Margaret Busby guests on BacklistedPod
New Daughters of Africa continues to be in the news as indefatigable champion and editor Margaret Busby makes it her calling card — here with novelist Nuruddin Farah — and also on a recent podcast talking with fellow guest Raymond Antrobus on BacklistedPod, the literary podcast presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. It’s always a revelation to hear Margaret speak, whether it is about her landmark anthologies, or, as on this episode, the novelist Andrew Salkey, and even the De La Warr Pavilion…
Sabba Khan talks to Sana Goyal of Wasafiri
‘In this moving and mighty coming-of-age graphic memoir, the artist and architect Sabba Khan explores big ‘isms’ – feminism, colonialism, and racism – alongside questions of identity, memory, family, H/history, Partition, and Islamophobia. And yet, it’s the small objects and memories – chocolate bars and sewing machines – that make her work so special and vulnerable.’ Sana Goyal, Wasafiri, on The Roles We Play by Sabba Khan.
A Q&A with Nicholas Royle by Samantha Harrold
“It’s uncanny – the thought and feeling that someone, in a sense, wouldn’t be identifiable or remembered without this piece of writing. That was a starting point for me. My mother was an amazing person and if I didn’t write about her, well, people wouldn’t even know she had existed!”
Nicholas Royle talks to Samantha Harrold about writing Mother: A Memoir in this richly detailed Q&A – read in full here.
Us and them: the advantages of being both
‘My father was always busy and barely spoke to us – and never in Hindi. He felt that “children were the mother’s province”, so we were brought up without even the basics of Indian culture.’
Umi Sinha talks to Writers Mosaic about her mixed-race heritage and how it informs her novel Belonging.
Umi Sinha delves into her own past
Novelist Umi Sinha delves into her own past to write Belonging, the beautiful and brutal story of Anglo Indian conflict during the days of the Raj.
She is interviewed here by Colin Grant at Writers Mosaic.
Does the writer have a responsibility?
Umi Sinha talks to Writers Mosaic about why she writes and the responsibilities of the writer.
Kathryn Heyman interviewed on Saturday Live
Kathryn Heyman talked to the ‘Saturday Live’ team about her near-death experience aboard a fishing trawler and how through reading she realised she could craft a new story for herself. All is revealed in her extraordinary book Fury: A Memoir: ‘Moving, funny, clever and revealing. Fury is utterly superb.’ Niki Bedi, BBC Radio 4 ‘Saturday Live’
Tyler Keevil on The Worm Hole podcast
Charlie Place asks Tyler Keevil about his latest novel, Your Still Beating Heart.
They discuss using the violence of Snow White in an adult thriller to shocking and literary effect, writing in the second person to tell a story within a story where either – or both, or none – may be ‘true’, and the many hearts at the heart of his novel.
Margaret Busby talks to Writers Mosaic
Margaret Busby CBE talks to the director Burt Caesar for Writers Mosaic about her daring beginnings as Britain’s first black female publisher in the 1960s.
Throughout her extraordinary career, Margaret has championed unknown authors and giants such as CLR James, whose work might have been forgotten but for her intervention.
Her two international anthologies, Daughters of Africa (1992) and New Daughters of Africa (2019), each featuring 200 writers, are widely regarded as monumental achievements that have changed the literary landscape.