In this episode, Andy and John are joined for a second time by Kit de Waal. Kit is a writer and activist whose debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Her second, The Trick of Time was published to great acclaim in 2018 and her most recent, a YA novel called Becoming Dinah, was published by earlier this year by Orion Children’s Books. She is the editor of the anthology of working class writers, Common People published by Unbound and the force behind the Kit de Waal Creative scholarships, for budding writers from a low-income households or marginalised backgrounds. For all this, and for being generally a force for good in the book industry, she was named 2019 Futurebook Person of the Year. Her previous appearance on Backlisted was on episode 26 back in 2016, where she talked about So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.

Kit is joined by the writer and journalist Charlotte Higgins, the chief culture writer of the Guardian. She is the author of several books on aspects of the ancient world. Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (Cape, 2013), was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction and the Wainwright Prize. Her latest book Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths (Cape, 2018) won the 2019 Arnold Bennett prize. Charlotte has written for the New Yorker, the New Statesman and Prospect and in 2010, she won the Classical Association prize for her books and journalism, awarded for the person deemed to have done most to bring classics to a broad audience. And in 2019 she was chosen for a British Council showcase by novelist Elif Shafak as one of ‘ten brilliant women writers’ working in Britain today.

The main book under discussion is Riceyman Steps  by Arnold Bennett, first published by Cassell & Company in 1923, and which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in the same year. Before that John rediscovers his North Eastern roots via Dan Jackson’s excellent new history The Northumbrians and Andy reflects on his recent re-readings of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Books mentioned:

Arnold Bennett - Riceyman Steps; The Old Wive’s Tale; Anna of the Five Towns; The Card; Clayhanger; Helen With the High Hand; Buried Alive; How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Kit de Waal - My Name is Leon; The Trick of Time; Becoming Dinah; Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers
Charlotte Higgins - Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain; Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go; The Unconsoled; The Buried Giant;
Dan Jackson - The Northumbrians
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Virginia Woolf - Jacob’s Room

Other links:

The Clientele - ‘Bookshop Casanova’
Novels that Shaped Our World (BBC, 2019)
Virginia Woolf - ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’
Omelette Arnold Bennett on Masterchef: The Professionals
Broadcast - ‘The Book Lovers’
The Go-Betweens - ‘Karen’
American Music Club - ‘Myopic Books’