Books on Podcasts: Irenosen Okojie and Colson Whitehead take to the mics
This week Irenosen Okojie discussed her latest novel and Colson Whitehead reflected on his 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad (Little, Brown).
On the "Open Book" podcast, host Johny Pitts spoke to Okojie about her "mythical" new novel Curandera (Dialogue) which brings together "West African spirituality, female desire and contemporary lives in the British capital". Speaking about her inspiration, Okojie said: "I’ve always been interested in African and indigenous spiritualities, what that looks like and why that hasn’t really been explored enough in fiction. I felt very passionate about the idea and at the centre of it I wanted to have these women exploring female desire, transformation and the complexities of being ‘other’ in different spaces and what that can look like. Also, ancestral connections to shamanism and the diaspora. Really, it was thinking about creating these two worlds that would be interconnected, like two sides of a coin."
Following from the New York Times project "100 Best Books of the 21st Century", voted for by a panel of over 500 writers, Gilbert Cruz interviewed Whitehead on "The Book Review" podcast about The Underground Railroad which appeared on the list. "It really was a new phase in my career," reflected Whitehead. "In the case of picking Cora [the central character], I wanted to do something that hadn’t happened in a while, which was having a female protagonist, and it allowed me to do different things in the story than if I’d had a male protagonist." Whitehead added later in the podcast: "I wanted to get slavery ‘right’... I wanted to get it right not only for the enslaved people in America, but also for my family members who were enslaved in Florida and Georgia... It was going to be brutal, realistic and truthful, and that was scary. I didn’t want to think about the brutal facts of slavery and putting that on the page... It was a hard book to write."
Rebecca Watson joined host Hannah MacDonald on the "A Pair of Bookends" podcast to discuss her new novel, I Will Crash (Faber), a "powerful, raw, intimate exploration of grief, forgiveness and complete family dynamics". When asked about her non-conventional writing style, Watson commented: "I felt like the page was failing me when I was trying to show a moment of honest present tense and all the layers of time. I felt the constraints of a paragraph... I just felt like it was insufficient. It was more instinctive than schemed. In the nature of asking the question ‘how to do it’, a system on the page appeared to me. Weirdly, to me, there are different tonal spaces across the page, and I really began to see the page a bit like a mind. As you go down the page you go through time and, depending whether you are on the right or lefthand side of the page, they [represent] different parts of the head or interiority versus exteriority."
