Wigtown Book Festival Podcast

We are joined by Abiola Bello and Helen Lewis from the Diverse Book Awards. They discuss how they started the awards in the middle of the pandemic, the challenges of running them and even a sneak peak of what to expect from Wigtown YA 2021.

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of 'Open Water', answers 31 pressing questions for Same Page.

If you're not signed up for Same Page, here's the link: https://bit.ly/samepageya

We go behind the scenes with publishers 404 Ink and their forthcoming new non-fiction series, Inklings. This conversation features founders Heather McDaid & Laura Jones, and author Katie Goh whose The End: Surviving the World Through Fictional Disasters will be one of the Inklings titles.

Sometimes a book comes along that marries meaning, moment and enthusiasm with such force and beauty that it stops you in your tracks. Steven Lovatt’s Birdsong in a Time of Silence is such a book. Started as the world ground to a halt - its first page opens on 24th March 2020 - it charts the extraordinary days of the past year spent noticing the chorus around us, despite it all. A keen birder, Steven delves into the magic of birdsong and the places it can take us when we have too much time to dwell in the weeds and margins of our minds.

As an audio finale for Big Bang we present an interview with Robert Shearman, a man of many talents whose stellar writing career spans theatre, television, audio drama, novels and short fiction. We discuss Rob's forthcoming novel, a Doctor Who Target novelisation of 'Dalek', an episode, also written by Rob, that many Whovians will fondly remember from 2005.

We also talk about Rob's book We All Hear Stories in the Dark. A titanic triptych weighing in at 3 volumes and nearly 2,000 pages, it is a thing of intricate and labyrinthine beauty, a choose your own adventure which no two readers will ever encounter in the same way. 
We reflect on how this epic act of love and grief came to be, the joys of reading, literary adaptation, fan culture, and the pleasures and pains of being a writer.