Booker Prize winning author, Yann Martel, chats to Simon and Matt about his new novel 'Son Of Nobody'.
They talk about The Iliad - one of his inspirations behind the book - as well as how we understand ancient history in 2026, and how we should tell those stories.
The novel explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live – then, now and always.
Here's a little more info on 'Son Of Nobody'
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.
As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its modern footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.