Fictionable

This autumn we've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and her band, Qarpa. This week we have an appointment with Seán Padraic Birnie and his story The Medical Room.Birnie tells us how he was fuelled by frustration at work and struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It made me laugh, I think," he says, "but I wasn't sure it would make anyone else laugh."Elements of the gruesome office mechanics in The Medical Room are drawn from life, Birnie explains, but the pull of horror fiction lays bare the power structures that are always at play.Next time we welcome Shauna Mackay, with Catriona Bolt joining us the following week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After hearing last week from M John Harrison, who discussed how he makes fiction from fragments of reality, this week we turn it up to eleven as we welcome Irena Karpa. Fuelled by the latest track from her band, Qarpa, she reads from Kate Tsurkan's translation of her short story, Fellow Traveler, and gives us the inside track on that journey.Karpa explains why the language from the streets that she used in her early novels came as such a shock to Ukrainian literary culture, and how her pride in her country is "like being proud that you have kidneys or heart or lungs – you're just born like this". Her fiction and her music are part of the same artistic project, she adds, even though sometimes her fans don't even know she does both.Looking back to 2014, Karpa remembers playing to crowds of thousands in Maidan square. She explores what life is like as the war grinds on, and looks forward to a day when Ukrainians can build a new society.Next time we'll be focusing on Seán Padraic Birnie, with Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt joining us over the weeks to come. In the meantime, you can read Kate Tsurkan's report on how Ukrainian writers have been responding to Russian aggression since 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie, Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt. But we launch this autumn podcast series with M John Harrison and his haunting short story, I Can't Tell.Harrison tells us how he constructs his stories from fragments of real life, filed in notebooks and then reassembled into uncanny structures on the page. At one stage, this process was "consciously not very fictiony" he says, but by the time you’ve spent ten years exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, "it's stopped being conscious any more, and it's just a thing that you do".Fiction should be "read like nonfiction", he continues. "It's not there for you to put on like clothes and re-enact."The past looms large over both I Can't Tell and his recent anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, but according to Harrison writing has always been a struggle with things that have gone before. That and his "very, very unrelatable" characters, who are uniformly tricky to get on with – tricky, that is, apart from the cats. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This summer we've been hearing a little more from our amazing authors in an expanded series of podcasts. Joyce Carol Oates confessed she feels "like a fourteen-year-old girl" while Fiona Mozley admitted to an "awkward personality". José Falero – voiced by Maria Jacqueline Evans – argued that the 21st century's obscene inequalities can only be addressed through "diversity in the spaces of power" and Donal McLaughlin declared that he does "expect the reader to keep up".We bring this series to a close with Sabba Khan, who joins us to talk about At the Door. She tells us how she started working on this graphic short story at a difficult time in her own life, and how the move from memoir into fiction gave her a sense of freedom. She reveals her obsession with London's Victorian terraced housing and a fascination with the spirit realm of black magic, djinns and demons. Khan also examines the barriers that divide comics from writing in prose, and reflects on the mystery of her mother tongue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this summer's new, expanded podcast we've already heard from Joyce Carol Oates, Fiona Mozley and José Falero – translated and interpreted by Maria Jacqueline Evans. This time we're heading north to catch up with Donal McLaughlin and his story runaway.McLaughlin has been writing short stories about his main character, Liam O'Donnell, for thirty years. Both author and protagonist grew up in the heart of a large, Catholic family and moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in the 1970s. And McLaughlin admits that runaway was sparked by a childhood memory of running away from home. But he denies his story is autobiographical, citing the title of Janice Galloway's 2008 memoir, This Is Not About Me.He explains how adopting Liam's narrow perspective allows him to widen the story's reach, and how the voice he hears in his head needs more than standard spellings to sing on the page. Going back to Derry as a teenager, McLaughlin says he would marvel at the humour, colour and warmth of the conversations around him. And it's that energy he captures in his prose.Next time we welcome Sabba Khan to talk about her story, At the Door. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've heard already this summer from Joyce Carol Oates and Fiona Mozley, but now the translator Maria Jacqueline Evans turns interpreter as we talk – via the magic of email – to José Falero.He tells us why he wanted to look at the violence of a flash kidnapping from the inside in his short story Flash of Dignity, and what drives his characters to attack a woman at gunpoint and throw her in the boot of her own car. According to Falero, capitalism is to blame: "Guarantee that people have access to consumption and they won’t rob from anyone."Even though he wrote the story in a Porto Alegre dialect, he continues, it has struck a chord with people all over Brazil because people all over Brazil are struggling with the same problems. And how do you fix the outrageous inequalities which are at the heart of all this? Falero’s answer is simple: diversity.Next time we'll joined by Donal McLaughlin with Sabba Khan following after. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After hearing last week how Joyce Carol Oates is firmly focused on the future, this week we’re focusing on Fiona Mozley and her mighty story Cadair Idris.She tells us how this trip up the mountain began on a family holiday and explores how characters suffering from mental illness pose a particular challenge for writers of fiction. As the kind of author who has always tried to put herself in other people's shoes, Mozley says she's convinced writers can tell stories that are not their own – provided they do the work.Next time we'll be hearing from José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, with Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan joining us over the coming weeks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's revolution on the Fictionable podcast, where we've evolved again to hear more from our fabulous contributors.We're devoting an entire programme to Joyce Carol Oates and her fantastic story Small Veins, with Fiona Mozley, José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan all joining us over the coming weeks.In this programme, Oates tells us how she paid for Small Veins with her own blood, and how she works out if something is a "Story" or a "Tale of Suspense". She talks typography as she explains how she captures the rhythm of thought on the page, and examines the very Oatesian notion that "the unimaginable improbable will become, within a surprisingly short period of time, the imagined probable"."In my heart I'm sort of like a fourteen-year-old girl," Oates confesses, and perhaps this focus on the new and the wonderful is the secret of the unquenchable creativity this eighty-five-year-old master of fiction in all its forms still shows in all her work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Fictionable podcast heads for Tel Aviv, where Etgar Keret talks about the mystery of translation, the surrealism of technology and surprising himself with his own fiction. The sudden reverses in stories like Point of No Return are rarely planned in from the start, Keret explains, but emerge as he writes – an impulse towards instability he attributes to his upbringing as the child of two Holocaust survivors.Lucy Caldwell tells us how she built her story Katherine Mansfield's Cat by weaving the New Zealander’s words with her own, and how the mystical connection she feels with the pioneering Modernist makes the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Michael Donkor says he didn't set out to épater les bourgeois with his strikingly intimate story of a three-way relationship, Invitation, while Adaora Raji reflects on how the Biafran war she returns to in her story The Proper Way to Cook Oha still feels like a "continuous present tense" more than fifty years later. And Serena Katt explains how her graphic story Submerged rose up from something that happened to her – an experience that is all the more shocking because it is so everyday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this edition of the Fictionable podcast, Diana Evans tells us how she started cooking up her short story Broth. She talks about minimalism in fiction, female friendship and how the category "black writing" doesn't make any sense. She also gives us a heads up about her forthcoming novel, A House for Alice, which finds the characters from Ordinary People struggling with questions of family and home.Carlos Rojas turns simultaneous interpreter as we hear from Yan Lianke, and get a taste of all the other stories in our Winter edition – stories from Ali Smith, Ross Raisin and Lizzy Stewart, who tries to work out the going rate when it comes to pictures and thousands of words. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Evie Wyld joins us for the second edition of the Fictionable podcast to spill the beans about the inspiration for her short story The Land. She tells us about childhood holidays in a rat-infested caravan on the Isle of Wight and how she's fascinated by the twists and folds of time. She also keeps us up to the minute, confessing that she can go wild when she writes in the present tense.We also welcome Amy Sackville, Yasmine Seale, Arinze Ifeakandu and Julian Hanshaw, who introduce all the stories in this Autumn issue – that is, when they can remember what they've written. And we also hear from our advisory panel: the composer Iain Chambers steps off the bench to provide the surging soundtrack to Fictionable’s audio output. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first edition of the Fictionable podcast, we welcome Sarah Hall, who reveals the inspirations for her story Be Good. She also explains why she chose to tell this haunting story in the second person, and why authors outside of the capital sometimes find themselves written out of the national conversation.We hear about all the stories in Summer 2022, with short readings from Hall, Alain Mabanckou, Ladee Hubbard, Owen Booth and Isabel Greenberg. And we also hear a little about how the magazine was funded, with a great, big Fictionable thank you to all our Kickstarter backers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.