London Review Bookshop Podcast

To mark the publication of the paperback edition of Mother, Brother, Lover, Jarvis Cocker joined us at the shop for a conversation with the novelist Jon McGregor – ‘Cocker’s lyrics were what made me want to tell stories’, McGregor wrote in the Guardian’s ‘My Hero’ column. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our International Translation Day event celebrated the distinguished career of Anthea Bell, who was in conversation with Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation. Literary translators are often compared to ventriloquists, but few have as many and varied voices as Anthea Bell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Will Self leads a panel discussion about questions thrown up by new technology, with special reference to ‘Kafka's Wound’, the digital literary essay he produced in collaboration with the LRB for The Space, a project from the Arts Council and BBC digital arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Teju Cole came to the Bookshop to discuss his first novel, Open City. The book, which follows a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City five years after 9/11, was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Internationaler Literaturpreis. Cole spoke in conversation with writer and journalist Max Liu. Their discussion took in the cities of Lagos, London and New York; W.G. Sebald; twitter as a literary medium; and the disturbing revelation which closes the novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'To the River' is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf’s river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Olivia came to the bookshop to talk about 'To the River' with Jean Sprackland, who won the 2012 Portico Prize for non-fiction for 'Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach', a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Macfarlane, perhaps the most accomplished exponent of the ‘New Nature Writing’, was at the Bookshop to describe his journeys, and to discuss what they can tell us about our nation, its history, present and people. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two of Britain’s most eminent female writers discussed literature, fiction, women, the short story and much else besides. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two translators – Shaun Whiteside and Mike Mitchell – went head to head with their versions of a previously untranslated work. Novelist Daniel Kehlmann provided the challenge, with the event chaired by Daniel Hahn, interim director of the BCLT and chair of the Translators Association. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Award-winning Swedish crime writers Karin Alvtegen and Håkan Nesser, chaired by Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at UCL, explore the power behind crime fiction's gripping narratives, its incisive portrayal of society and its confrontation with ideas of good and evil in a shades-of-grey world, where simple moral certainties aren't so easy to find. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelists Daniel Kehlmann and Benjamin Markovits share interests in their work in biography, genius and failure, charisma and the question of how to give voice to real historical figures but have differences too; both make fuel for a very interesting conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.