Fictionable

• Julian George: 'Any word out of place, the whole thing is worthless'

  So far we've heard from Helga Schubert and Ben Sorgiovanni in this Winter season. We'll be welcoming Joanna Kavenna and Rachida Lamrabet over the next couple of weeks, but for this feature we present Julian George and The Movie Lovers.George tells us how this short story emerged from the classic 1950s sitcom, The Honeymooners."I just thought of the character played by Audrey Meadows, Alice," he says. "Sometimes that character wanted something else, or there were moments of unexpected poignancy."The cinema on East 14th Street where his two movie lovers meet was a "real picture palace", George continues. "I don't know if Charlie Chaplin or Al Jolson or Jimmy Cagney ever went there, but I like to think they did."There may be plenty of gaps in the history of the Imperial for the writer of fiction to explore, but George was determined to find room to experiment in his novella Bebe, a fantasia on the life of Richard Nixon's friend, confidant and fixer Bebe Rebozo."I could have written this rather straightforward book," he explains, but "I have to keep myself entertained. I like to have a laugh."Writing may be fun, but as a poet George is keenly aware of the need to measure out his prose, beat by beat."I want it to sing," he says, "but the song might be a darker one." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Ben Sorgiovanni: 'What fiction does really well is capture the nuance of human experience'

  This Winter series of podcasts got underway with Helga Schubert, who told us how she put together her short story On Getting Up from pieces of her past. This season we'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet and Julian George, but this time we meet Ben Sorgiovanni and his story No One Here Knows You.He tells us how this story grew out of a philosophical thought experiment about how you would know there was a tiger in a forest if you'd never seen it, and why his characters were looking for a tiger, not a mouse."I think it's quite symbolically rich, this idea of a tiger," Sorgiovanni says. "I don't know exactly what it symbolises in the story, but I like the idea of the tiger there, in the national park somewhere, but out of view."He reveals that – as it happens – he went to India and didn't see a tiger. But the line between his own experience and the experiences of his characters is something he still wants to explore."There are a whole bunch of interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between a philosophical article – which advances an argument – and a short story – which has a conclusion, but doesn't necessarily have an argument in the same sense."Perhaps a subject for further study. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Helga Schubert: 'There's got to be distance between the writer and their story'

  As the world lurches into 2025 we launch into another series of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet, Ben Sorgiovanni and Julian George over the next few weeks, but we start with Helga Schubert and her short story On Getting Up, translated by Aaron Sayne and Lillian M Banks.Banks turns interpreter as Schubert explains how this story was awakened by an appearance on a panel discussing one of German literature's most prestigious awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize."The joke is," Schubert says, "the only reason I was even selected as a jury member was because I hadn't been allowed to take part when I was invited as an author in back in 1980."It's a story that had to bide its time, Schubert continues. "I had to wait until my mother died, because I didn't want to subject her to the truth about this whole thing."The stories in On Getting Up are all true, she insists, "They're all fragments, like ruins, or rubble I've come across in my life."These pieces are then assembled in an almost mathematical construction to make a coherent whole."Everything has to add up precisely," Schubert explains, "nothing is coincidental… It's really as if I were building something, a house for example. It's as if I'm sewing a patchwork quilt."Her training as a psychotherapist has helped the author distance herself from her own work – a vital skill for a writer, Schubert maintains. "Without this distance you wouldn’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Esther Karin Mngodo: 'I am more myself when I write in Swahili'

  Last year we heard from Daisy Johnson, Judith Vanistendael, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb. We bring our Autumn series to a close – just in time for Winter – with Esther Karin Mngodo and the translator Jay Boss Rubin, who join us to talk about First Date.Mngodo tells us how this story ate another of her short stories, Without Sun."It came from the idea of how things are within other things," she says, "how everything is interconnected."In First Date, the links stretch across an entire millennium. Mngodo feels that we still have much in common with each other, even across vast distances of time and space."The human experience, whether you're in Tanzania, or you're in London, or in America, it's still the same," she explains. "We still feel fear, we still have hope. We still want to love and be loved."Our experiences may be the same, but there are still tensions in the ways we reflect them in language, even when it is our mother tongue."We tend to believe that Swahili is this very beautiful language that is locked with the great writers like Shaaban Roberts," Mngodo says. "The rest of us are just aspiring to get there. And so for most of my life I felt that I wasn't good enough in the Swahili that I spoke or wrote."It was when she first went to the US and Canada to study that she began to embrace writing in Swahili, a decision that affected her on the deepest levels."It was during that time that I realised I started dreaming in Swahili," she recalls.With a language like Swahili, these complications are rooted in the complexities of a contested history."For people who like to argue," Rubin says, "you can argue that Swahili is detrimental to local indigenous languages. They're being wiped out because Swahili is used as a national and regional language. Now you could also say the same thing about what English is doing to Swahili."But it's also very possible for languages "to enrich one another", he continues. "There's not like a net sum, where when more English comes in Swahili gets pushed out, or vice versa."For Mngodo the question of what language to write in goes beyond "who owns the language"."The language belongs to me," she insists, "if I can express through it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Hannah Webb: 'I always seem to end up writing at the extremes'

  We opened this Autumn season with Daisy Johnson and followed up with Judith Vanistendael and Scott Jacobs. We'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo over the next week or so, but this episode is devoted to Hannah Webb and her short story Titanic.While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists that her story is definitely not autobiographical."I have been on one of those holidays," she says, "but it didn't end up like that. There was much less cruelty."Under the surface, she explains, Titanic is driven by technology."Teenagers have been struggling with their mental health for a long, long time. But I suppose phones do bring this new aspect into it of never being able to turn off. And the internet is this vast space where there's endless things you could be looking at. Sometimes it's very difficult to know when to stop looking."In our connected world, you're never far from the extremes, Webb continues, extremes that are often rewarded by the algorithm. But that unreality doesn't make the experience any less important."The emotions that you feel from it are happening in the same body," she says, "and you're going to have the same mind. It's good to retain perspective, but at the same time it can be dismissed too easily as not real."The world always feels like it's breaking, she adds, but Webb hasn't given up hope. "While there's maybe a lot of uncertainty, part of that uncertainty is also possibility."We'll be exploring possible futures with Esther Karin Mngodo next time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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