This month we return to our first in-person recording for way too long, as we sat down with writer, musician and all-round cultural agitator Bill Drummond. As half of the KLF, Bill produced some of the finest singles of the 1990s, before dumping a dead sheep at the door of the Brit Awards, deleting the group's back catalogue and burning a million q…

This month, we are speaking to the Egyptian poet and author Iman Mersal. We talk about the genesis of ideas, structure and form when writing in Arabic, and the importance of urgency in directing your writing. Iman's work includes the creative non-fiction work Traces of Enayat (2023, And Other Stories https://www.andotherstories.org/traces-of-enayat…

Episode 60 with Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams This month, we are speaking to not one but two authors as we discuss collaborative writing with Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams. Natasha and Luke are the joint authors of Diego Garcia, winner of the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize. We talk about their unique approach to crafting a novel and the di…

We're opening 2024 with our chat with David Shields: David is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an N…

In this episode we're joined by Johanna Hedva, a Korean American writer, artist, and musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Johanna is the author of the essay ‘Sick Woman Theory’, originally published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is also the author of the no…

For episode 57 we caught up with the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, author of 8 novels, 3 collections of short stories, numerous plays and pieces of non-fiction and 5 memoirs. An indefatigable defender and promoter of African literature and language, Ngũgĩ’s writing spans from the early 1960s onwards. He talked to us about his journey to becoming…

For episode 56 we're joined by Daisy Hildyard, the author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2013) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). Daisy’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body, a bril…

This month marks the fifth anniversary of Unsound Methods - thank you to everyone who's joined us along the way, and hello to any new arrivals... In this episode we speak to Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey about the writing of their collaboratively composed novel 'Macbeth, Macbeth' (available from Boiler House Press, here: https://www.boilerhouse.pre…

In a slight shift from our literary fiction focus, we caught up with writer and script editor Jenny Landreth - one of the driving forces behind the brilliant children's animated TV show 'Hey Duggee'. Having both become fathers only weeks apart in the summer of 2018, Hey Duggee was one of the most joyful discoveries in the often barren wastelands of…

In this episode with chatted with Etgar Keret, writer of short stories, comics, a children's book and a memoir. Etgar's books have been published in fifty languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. He is currently a Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev…

Our guest in this episode is Australian writer Daniel Davis Wood, author of Blood and Bone (2014) which won the Viva La Novella Prize and At the Edge of the Solid World (2020), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Our chat with Daniel covered unconventional composition techniques derived from artistic practice, the difference between…

Episode 51 with Claudia Durastanti. This month we speak to writer and translator Claudia Durastanti. We cover the importance of travel and geography in writing, mapping fictional spaces, translation and the overlap of metaphor between languages. Claudia is the author of Strangers I Know and Cleopatra Goes To Prison, translated to English, as well a…

Hitting the half century, we speak to British-Argentine poet and journalist Miguel Cullen, author of collections including Wave Caps (2014), Paranoid Narcissism! (2017) and, most recently, Hologram (2022). Miguel's work has involved integrating sound chips and video-screens into the bound collections, raising some interesting blends of form. He has…

This month we speak to writer and artist Sara Baume. Sara is the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), A Line Made by Walking (2017), the non-fiction handiwork (2020) and Seven Steeples, which is released this month on Tramp Press, who have published all of her work so far. Amongst much else, we cover: living a creative life that combines wr…

In this episode we speak to writer Richard Beard. Richard’s six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His novel Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and he is the author of five works of narrative non-fiction. His memoir The Day That Went Missing won t…

In our latest episode we had a chat with novelist Sam Byers, author of Idiopathy (2013), Perfidious Albion (2018) and last year's Come Join Our Disease. We talked about needing to write ideas down and how they eventually demand it, using a journal while writing a novel, getting the voice right before venturing too far and the vast gulf between dial…

Our first guest of 2022 is the novelist Keith Ridgway, author of, among other works, 'the Long Falling' (1998), 'the Parts' (2003), 'Animals' (2006), 'Hawthorn and Child' (2012) and, most recently, 'A Shock' (2021), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Keith was awarded the Rooney Prize in 2001. Our chat with Keith took us through the da…

Our guest this month is Jenn Ashworth, author of A Kind of Intimacy (2009), Cold Light (2011), The Friday Gospels (2013), Fell (2017) and the non-fiction work Notes Made While Falling (2019). Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story out now with Sceptre. She lives in Lancashire and is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University. Amongst much el…

This month we are joined by Lucie Elven, short-story writer and author of the Weak Spot, the debut novel published earlier this year by Prototype in the UK. Lucie has written for publications including the London Review of Books, Granta and NOON. Our chat took us on an Alpine tour through topics including: how notes demand to be put into short stor…

As we roll into autumn, we're joined by Rebecca Watson, novelist and arts writer. Rebecca's debut novel, Little Scratch, grew from a short story that was shortlisted for the White Review short story prize and the novel itself was shortlisted for this year's Desmond Elliott Prize. Among all the other talking our chat took us through: expanding a sho…

For our August '21 episode we're joined by Natasha Brown, the author of Assembly, which is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and will be released in the U.S. on 14th September 2021 by Little, Brown. Our discussion with Natasha includes workshopping at different stages, making speech real on the page, liberal use of index cards, and being in th…

In this month's episode we're joined by the novelist Sophie Mackintosh, who is the author of 'the Water Cure' (2018) and 'Blue Ticket' (2020). Topics covered with Sophie include (alongside much more): the shift to writing full time, the importance of music and having a bespoke playlist for each book, and writing a synopsis at the very beginning to …

“If Adorno was alive today, he’d be writing about football. I don’t think he’d like it… but he’d be writing about it. And Gramsci for sure” In this, our 40th episode, we've got a special Euro 2020 edition of Unsound Methods, where we speak to writer and academic David Goldblatt. David is the author of non-fiction works which cover sport, particular…

In this episode we speak with DBC Pierre, author of Vernon God Little (for which he won the Booker Prize in 2003), Ludmila's Broken English (2006), Lights Out in Wonderland (2010), Breakfast with the Borgias (2014) and most recently, Meanwhile in Dopamine City which was published in 2020. Pierre joined us fresh off a bout of working on a non-fictio…

In this month's episode, we speak to Jon McGregor, whose latest novel Lean, Fall, Stand is published by Fourth Estate on 29th April. Jon joined us in the midst of full fat lockdown to discuss how he constructs his novels, his writing residency in Antarctica and the research with people who suffer from aphasia and their carers that informed Lean, Fa…

In episode 37 we're joined by Douglas Robertson to celebrate the publication of his brand new translation of Thomas Bernhard's Die Billigesser (the Cheap Eaters) and to discuss our favourite Austrian monologuing misanthrope. Douglas is a writer and translator based in Keystone, Florida. He studied British and American Literature at the New College …

Something a little different for the first pod of 2021: Lochlan and Jaimie get together (remotely) and have a couple of drinks to celebrate the launch of Jaimie's debut novel 'Siphonophore' - which is out now through Valley Press. The chat covers Jaimie's approach to writing, a bit of his history, sacrilegious suggestions of cuts to Finnegans Wake …

In this month's episode, we caught up with John Englehardt, author of 'Bloomland' (2019, Dzanc Books). John has also written for Vol.1 Brooklyn, Sycamore Review, The Stranger, Seattle Review of Books, Conium Review, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Bloomland deals with the lead-up and fall-out of a college shooting through three separate narratives, t…

In this month's episode we took a wild ride with David Keenan. David was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author of three novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device, which won the Collyer Bristow/London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the …

In this month's episode we speak to Gabriel Josipovici. Gabriel's first novel was published in 1968 and his writing career spans over twenty works of fiction, numerous works of criticism and non-fiction, and regular articles in the TLS. Continuing our current coronavirus set-up, Gabriel joined us remotely from Sussex and our discussion covered how …

“What you push against is as important as what you reach towards” On this month's episode we speak to Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, author of Malarky (2013), Martin John (2016) and Bina (2020). Anakana joined us from the West Coast of Canada to discuss representations of older women in fiction, the musical score of the novel and missing …

Something a little different this month as Lochlan and Jaimie pause to review how the COVID-19 lockdown has impacted their reading and writing, and to take a look back at the teenage reading paths that led them to experimental/innovative fiction. We'd love to hear about your lockdown reading and writing and the reading path you've taken through the…

In episode 30, we speak to writer, translator and musician, Jen Calleja, author of the short story collection 'I'm Afraid that's All We've Got Time For' (2020, Prototype). We (remotely, respecting social distancing!) discuss bus travel as fertile ground for creativity, writing across different forms - from translation to poetry, novels and short st…

In episode 29, we speak to writer and broadcaster Hamid Ismailov. Hamid joined us pre-Covid-19-lockdown, on his way to the Faversham Literature Festival. Hamid's novels include 'the Devil's Dance' and 'of Strangers and Bees', both available through Tilted Axis Press in the UK. More info at: https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/hamid-ismailov As a writer…

This episode is a little different to our usual output as we speak to Jonathan Simons: publisher, writer, editor, musician, occasional translator, and the person behind the Analog Sea Review. The Analog Sea is an 'offline publisher of printed books', but there's much more to it that that - as you will hear, Jonathan's entire approach involves shunn…

In episode 27 we speak to Caleb Klaces, poet, academic and author of 'Fatherhood' (2019, Prototype). Caleb is also the author of 'Bottled Air' (2013), winner of the Melita Hume Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, as well as two chapbooks: 'All Safe All Well' (2011) and 'Modern Version' (2018). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Lite…

In Episode 26, we speak to Vesna Main, author of Good Day? (Salt, 2019) which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize last year. Vesna has previously published A Woman with No Clothes On (Delancey Press 2008) and The Reader the Writer (Mirador, 2015). Temptation: A User’s Guide, a collection of her short stories, was published by Salt in January 2…

In episode 25, we speak to Tony White, author of ‘The Fountain in the Forest’ (Faber, 2018) as well as ‘Road Rage’, ‘Satan Satan Satan’, ‘Charlieunclenorfolktango’, ‘Foxy-T’, ‘Shackleton’s Man Goes South’, the non-fiction title ‘Another Fool in the Balkans’, and many other short stories, novellas and collaborations. He was writer in residence at th…

In Episode 24, we speak to Yara Rodrigues Fowler, the author of Stubborn Archivist (Fleet, 2019). We spoke to Yara about publisher demands to make her novel at least twice as long, the power of white space, developing a two-headed bildungsroman, the challenges facing contemporary Brazil and how writers are facing them. You can buy Stubborn Archivis…

In Episode 23 we speak to Mazin Saleem, the author of 'the Prick', published as part of Open Pen's series of novelettes. We speak to Mazin about discovering that you're not really a night-owl, using software to improve your writing productivity, and the freedom of jumping around the manuscript while editing to keep things fresh. You can buy the Pri…

In episode 22, we speak to Shiromi Pinto, the author of 'Plastic Emotions' (2019, Influx Press) and 'Trussed' (2006, Serpent's Tail). You can order Plastic Emotions here. We spoke to Shiromi about her use of real letters to produce fiction; what she does with her writing offcuts; how far 500 words a day can get you; and losing faith, spiking a proj…

In episode 21 we sit down with Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt, to speak to him about his process, the line between history and fiction and the benefits of a good pair of slippers. Mathias' work includes the novels ‘Zone’, ‘Compass’, ‘Street of Thieves’ and ‘Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants’ which he was promoting when we spoke …

This month we speak to Norwegian author and artist Edy Poppy. Edy's debut novel Anatomi. Monotoni. won the Gylendal Prize in 2005 and was recently published in English as Anatomy. Monotony. by Dalkey Archive. Tr. May-Brit Akerholt. Anatomy. Monotony. is available at Dalkey Archive Press, who will also publish the collection Coming. Apart. (containi…

In this episode we speak to novelist, bookseller and publisher Samuel Fisher. Sam's debut 'the Chameleon' was published by Salt in 2018. You can buy the Chameleon here: Salt - the Chameleon As we mention at the beginning, there were some technical issues with the sound on one of the microphones in this episode - apologies, but it should sound ok if…

In episode 18, we speak to Marc Nash, most recently author of 'Three Dreams in the Key of G', published by Dead Ink in 2018. Marc joined us in London to discuss choosing the playlist to write to, intense bursts of writing during the summer holidays, using the editing process to add material rather than remove, playing through language, writing acro…

Welcome all to the first Unsound Methods of 2019! This month, we are delighted to be joined for a second time by Eimear McBride. In episode 12 we spoke to Eimear alongside Noémi Lefebvre but we didn't have much time to speak to them before that evening's event, so Eimear was kind enough to come to the studio for a more extended chat. Among other su…

No guest this month (don't worry, more fantastic writers will be appearing here starting again in January). In this Xmas '18 special edition, Lochlan and Jaimie get tanked up on port and mince pies to conduct a brief dissection of the first year of Unsound Methods as well as a review of what they've learnt before getting stuck in to a couple of mos…

This month we speak to Tom Lee award-winning short fiction writer and author of The Alarming Palsy of James Orr. We talk about Tom's approach to writing and how he finds new ideas, the impact of ill-health on his writing as well as the difficulties in moving from short stories to longer form fiction. Tom's work has appeared in The Sunday Times, Esq…

In this month's episode we speak to Lars Iyer, weaver of fiction in blog-form, novelist and erstwhile philosopher. Among many other things we talked to Lars about turning blogs into novels (as he did with his first three novels 'Spurious', 'Dogma' and 'Exodus'), his path to being a serial producer of trilogies and making the most of your spouse as …

Welcome to the second series of Unsound Methods. In this episode we speak to Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, the author of Call Me Zebra from Alma Books (in the UK). Azareen's debut novel was Fra Keeler. Topics covered in our chat included research, working with editors and the paths that reading can take while putting a novel together. Thanks to Bur…