I started this podcast because I had a theory that all books were about writing. That if I talked to writers about books I’d could learn something about how they wrote. I had this idea that talking about a book not written by an author would tell me something about their craft that asking them about their craft couldn’t.

NEON CAPITALISM Image licensed under Creative Commons by Flickr user Gino

I’m not sure how this experiment is going. I have no idea what the findings are because really, I’ve been a bit swept up in what I’m learning about reading.

When I started this series, I wasn’t completely convinced by Oryx and Crake. I had some misgivings. I worried that I’d chosen the wrong book, they we should be reading The Handmaiden’s Tale. But as I’ve talked to people they’ve shown me, through their reading, that actually Oryx and Crake is quite an exceptional book. You’ll hear me in this episode with the awesome prose writer Antonia Bale come to a state of mind-explosion about how exactly this book talks to our moment in time. Antonia first read this book in a fevered weekend and has since gone back to it and I really benefited from her close reading and the passion she has for this trilogy.

Antonia is the only guest in this series who hasn’t been on the podcast before. So here’s a brief bio.

Antonia Bale is currently writing a collection of short stories for her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. She’s a proud Wellingtonian and works as writer and senior content producer at a digital agency. Reading is her first love. Her favourite short story writers include George Saunders, Tracey Slaughter, Tobias Wolff, Janet Frame, Wells Tower and Katherine Mansfield. When it comes to novels, she’s a big fan of Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison. She’s currently reading Bad Behaviour, a collection of short stories by Mary Gaitskill. She heard about it on Better Off Read 😉

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Or you can listen to it here:

Episode 47: Oryx and Crake Series 3 – Pip Adam talks to Antonia Bale