Unsound Methods

In this episode we caught up with Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein (featuring occasional contributions from her then newborn child). Sarah is the author of the novels 'the Coming Bad Days' (2021) and 'Study for Obedience' (2023) and the poetry collection 'Now Comes the Lightening' (2015). Recorded back at the beginning of 2024, our chat covers, amongst other things, the relative importance of voice over story in Sarah’s writing, the overlap between academic writing and fiction, including references in fictional work, taking notes while reading (and the stress this can add to reading a book you’ve been looking forward to), reading the audiobook version of something you’ve written... - We are on Bluesky: @unsoundmethodspod.bsky.social -  @jaimiebatchan.bsky.social Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for lis

This month we are speaking with international prize-winning novelist and former Edinburgh Makar / Poet Laureate (2008-2014), Ron Butlin. In 2009 he was made the first-ever Honorary Writing Fellow (together with Ian Rankin) at Edinburgh University. Much of his work — novels, short stories and poetry — has been widely broadcast and translated. In addition to his plays for BBC radio and theatre, he has written seven opera libretti, three of them for Scottish Opera. He also writes for children. Ron has given countless readings worldwide — from a one-roomed Shetland primary school to an Arab tent in the desert (most wonderfully accompanied by a Bahraini oudplayer), from the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh to the House of Lords in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and to a waterfront festival in Sydney. Personal Bio: I was brought up in a small Borders village, quit school at sixteen and hitchhiked down to London. A brief period of life on the streets, (see my recent novel So Many Lives and All of Them Are Yours, 2

This month's episode features our chat with novelist and short story writer Amina Cain, the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two collections of short stories, Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. Her latest book, A Horse at Night: On Writing, came out in October of 2022 with Dorothy, a publishing project in the US and Daunt Books in the UK. In 2021, she was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, LA Times, Tate Etc. and other places.   Amina has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago; Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West H

This month’s episode is our chat with the late Christopher Priest, who sadly passed away on 2nd February 2024. In what will have been one of his last interviews, we spoke to Christopher on 3rd November 2023, where he talked us through his development as a writer, his skepticism about using notebooks, dealing with dreadful editors,  not writing for nine years, and how writing is like walking to Doncaster. Christopher was a hugely acclaimed writer, and having written for nearly 60 years, his work spanned a vast universe, from hard science fiction to high profile Hollywood film adaptation by Christopher Nolan. His works include The Affirmation, Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Inverted World, The Glamour, The Prestige, and The Separation. It was an honour to get to speak to Christopher. For those interested in his writing, his website is still online, containing a treasure trove of articles, links to all his works and his thoughts on a range of subjects: https://christopher-priest.co.uk/ - - - - Find us

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 quid on a Scottish Island. But he has a writing life so rich and interesting that we don't ask him a single question about any of that. You can access Bill's series of spoken novels and associated material at Penkiln Burn: https://www.penkilnburn.com/home/ - as discussed, they can't be binged and are on a rotation with a new one each day. You can read a bit more of Bill's writing about the Curfew Tower in Cushendall, and see some photos, here: https://visualartists.ie/ask-for-zippy-bill-drummond-tells-the-tale-of-how-and-why-he-established-the-artists-residency-in-a-tower-on-the-antrim-coast/ Thanks to the School of Advanced Study, University of London, for providin

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/), and her poetry  has been featured in numerous publications such as Blackbird, The American Poetry Review, Parnassus, The New York Review of Books, and Paris Review. - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

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 differences between empathy and solidarity, as well as the current situation for the displaced Chagossian people, a key focus of their novel.  An update from the authors: This podcast was recorded on 13 October when the UK was in active negotiations to hand back the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, whose sovereignty over the islands is internationally recognised. The then UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s announcement on 3 November 2022 included a statement of the UK’s will to "resolve all outstanding issues" in relation to Chagos, indicating recognition of the Chagossian people’s right to return. In January 2024, in a Foreign Affairs Committee Meeting disc

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 NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and B

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 novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper’s favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. 'Your Love is Not Good' is out now, available from And Other Stories: https://www.andotherstories.org/your-love-is-not-good/ Johanna's website: https://johannahedva.com/ Johanna’s Nine Inch Nails piece in the White Review is here: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/theyre-really-close-to-my-body/ Johanna's latest record: https://bighedva.bandcamp.com/album/black-moon-lilith-in-pisces-in-the-4th-house  A new piece called "scream demo": https://www.amant.org/publications/10-scream-demo "Why it's taking so long" (essay): ht

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 a writer, from having friends who proved he didn’t need to wait for permission, then being a central figure in the emergence of African writing’s recognition across the world, being imprisoned for writing a play in his native Kikuyu language, to then receiving a medical diagnosis that meant he had a very short amount of time to write his ‘final’ book. It’s quite a ride. Technical note: Due to some kind of infrastructural fault at his home, Ngũgĩ spoke to us from a hotel room and we had to record via MS Teams, so the audio is not quite up to our usual standards. There's also something odd with the audio at the very beginning, apologies!   Find us on Twitter: @Unso

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 brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born. Emergency was published last year by Fitzcarraldo Editions: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/emergency This episode took us on a ride through shutting out the world during your writing time, having a spouse as your first reader, how notes come together, and the different nudges that fiction and non-fiction give you as a writer. Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and loch

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.press/product-page/macbeth-macbeth-by-ewan-fernie-simon-palfrey)  'Macbeth, Macbeth' is described by its authors as a critical fiction. A sequel, critique, and repetition of Shakespeare’s play. Slavoj Žižek has described it as: ‘a miracle, an instant classic… as close as one can come to a quantum physics literary criticism’. A video trailer for the book is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru-seZCr3Ho Ewan Fernie is Director of the 2-million-pound lottery-funded ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project (everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk), which is reviving the world’s first great Shakespeare library and Birmingham’s broader reputation as a pioneering modern

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 our young daughters' TV choices... We learnt about how script editing works and how a show like Hey Duggee is put together, as well as speaking a little about Jenny's work on the upcoming reboot of the Magic Roundabout. Jenny also spoke about balancing non-fiction writing with children's TV and the feast and famine nature of freelance work. WARNING: for those of you who might want to listen with Duggee loving children around, there is a small sprinkling of the kind of language you wouldn't hear in the Squirrels' clubhouse... Jenny is on Twitter (although she uses it more for her personal life than professional): @jennylandreth Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethod

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. He has received the Book Publishers Association's Platinum Prize several times, the St Petersburg Public Library's Foreign Favourite Award (2010) and the Newman Prize (2012). In 2010, he was honoured in France with the decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2007, Keret and Shira Geffen won the Cannes Film Festival's "Camera d'Or" Award for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award of the French Artists and Writers' Guild. His latest collection "Fly Already" won the most prestigious literary award in Israel, the Sapir prize (2018), as well as the National Jewish Book Award of the Jewish Book Council. Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMetho

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 writing novellas and novels, reading your work out loud and plenty more. We also briefly covered Daniel's work as a publisher with his press Splice. The Garielle Lutz essay that Daniel references can be found here: https://culture.org/the-sentence-is-a-lonely-place/ You can find out about Daniel, his writing and his publishing via his website: https://danieldaviswood.com/ Daniel is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/DanielDavisWood And his books (aside from At the Edge of the Solid World) are available via Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/daniel-davis-wood - or your local bricks and mortar book shop... Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @J

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 as well as Un giorno verrò a lanciare sassi alla tua finestra and A Chloe, per le ragioni sbagliate. Claudia is on twitter here: https://twitter.com/CDurastanti And her books are available via Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/books?keywords=claudia+durastanti - or your local bricks and mortar book shop... Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts

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 been published by Caught by the River, Abridged, Lunar Poetry, Magma Poetry, Purple Fashion Magazine and Stand. He was shortlisted for the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Award 2020. Ambit magazine wrote about his latest book, Hologram: "Is this the first ever poetry book with a film screen? Psychedelic modernity, embracing London meets LatinX, a collage of myths in language medium and form."   Our chat (somewhat truncated by some sound issues) covered the factors that lead to pieces becoming a collection, the confrontation between competing attitudes towards the canon (whatever that means!), what artists from other forms can bring to written work, and the

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 writing and visual art; learning narrative from arthouse cinema; finding a form from the original idea; writing slowly; abandoning work that doesn’t feel right. Sara's Instagram is: @saraofthebaumes Sara's books are available directly from Tramp Press: https://tramppress.com/writer/sara-baume/ or through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/sara-baume - or your local bricks and mortar book shop... Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Tha

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 the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography and in the US was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. His latest memoir/polemic is Sad Little Men. Subjects covered include: tricking yourself into starting a writing project, how Richard's approach has changed over the course of nearly a dozen books (is 11 'a writer's dozen?'), youthful experimentation with squared paper, and knowing if the proportions of a novel feel right at the end of the first draft. Richard has a website: https://www.richardbeard.info/ And he's on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BeardRichard Richards's books are available through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/richard-

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 dialogue on the page and in the real world. Sam has a website: http://sambyers.co.uk/ Sam's books are available through Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/sam-byers - or your local bricks and mortar book shop... Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/ We have loosely teamed up with the Institute