The literary podcast that has been giving new life to old books since 2015. For show notes visit backlisted.fm and get an extra two shows a month by supporting the pod at patreon.com/backlisted
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Beloved by Toni Morrison was first published in 1987 by Knopf, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, among many other prizes. In 2006, the New York Times declared Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years. and more recently it came second in the Guardians top 100 novels of all time. This show was recorded in 2019 and our guest is Preti Taneja a novelist, a teacher and an activist. She won the Desmond Elliot Prize for her first book, We That A...
There can be few writers more deserving of Backlisted’s attention than the Irish writer, Maeve Brennan. An adopted New Yorker, Brennan died there in 1993 and was by that time so thoroughly forgotten in her native land, that she received no obituaries in any Irish papers. We are joined by the writers Sinéad Gleason and David Hayden to discuss her collection, The Springs of Affection – subtitled ‘stories of Dublin’ – which was first published posthumously by Houghton Mifflin in 1997, although all ...
Back in 2022, our guest was Stephen Fry, writer, actor and polymath, who joined John and Andy to discuss Oscar Wilde's De Profundis , the essay addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 'from the depths' of Wilde's incarceration in Reading Gaol. It has been described by Colm Tóibín as 'one of the greatest love letters ever written'; it is also Wilde's most powerful testament of the sacred duty of the artist as he conceived it. We discuss the work's convoluted publication history, Wilde's posthumo...
In this episode from March 2019, Andy and John are joined by Georgina Morley who was then the Non-Fiction Editorial Director at Picador, and Lucy Scholes, the Senior Editor at McNally Editions. The book under discussion is Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices , her fourth novel, set in the BBC's Broadcasting House during the Second World War. Before that, John extols the virtues of The Good Immigrant (USA) edited by Nikesh Shukla & Chimene Suleyman and Andy is impressed by Sarah Moss’s Ghost W...
In a special edition recorded earlier this year live at the Durham Book Festival, John and Andy are joined by writers Adele Stripe and Ben Myers to discuss Gordon Burn's debut novel Alma Cogan . The 'What Have We Been Reading?' slots are occupied by Pevsner's guide to Durham and The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent b...
Recorded back in 2017, John and Andy were joined by poet, radio presenter, playwright and genuine tyke Ian McMillan to discuss Malcolm Lowry's 1947 masterwork, Under The Volcano . Also, The Factory of Light by Michael Jacobs, and more Rosemary Tonks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joining John and Andy in this episode are multiple returnees and Official Friends of Backlisted: Dr Una McComack and Andrew Male. The book they are here to talk about is The Inheritors by William Golding, his second published novel (after Lord of the Flies) and first released by Faber & Faber in 1955. And it is one of the titles on the list Andy and John made when they first met to talk about Backlisted and the kind of books they’d like to feature. This episode also features Andy enjoying Sq...
Dr Rowan Williams, theologian, poet and former Archbishop of Canterbury, joins Andy and John for a thoughtful and moving discussion of Till We Have Faces (1956), the last novel by C.S. Lewis. This episode was recorded in London in June 2025. Although not as well-reviewed as his previous work, C.S. Lewis believed Till We Have Faces to be "far and away my best book". Over the 70 years since publication, critical opinion has risen in line with the author's estimation. The book shows a more troubled...
Ian Patterson, author of Books: A Manifesto , returns to Backlisted for a joyful discussion of Iris Murdoch and her sixteenth novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), the winner of the Whitbread literary award for fiction. For reasons that will be obvious, the talk soon turns to other novels by Murdoch, including The Bell (1958), The Black Prince (1973), The Sea, the Sea (1978) and The Green Knight (1993), plus the film adaptations of A Severed Head (1961) and the unknown book that spaw...
Biographer and singer-songwriter Paul Thompson joins us for a new episode of Backlisted devoted to the life and work of Jake Thackray, the so-called 'Yorkshire chansonnier' who died in 2002. Thackray was a man of many talents, as demonstrated by Jake Thackray: The Unsung Writer , a new anthology of his prose and poetry. We invited our friend and fellow fan Andrew Male to join us for a discussion of the teacher from Leeds who lionised Georges Brassens when few outside the French-speaking world ha...
Merry Christmas! Join Andy and Una, plus authors Louie Stowell and Robert Shearman, for a post-solstice celebration of Asterix and the Roman Agent (1972) by René Goscinny (words) and Albert Uderzo (pictures), first published in France in 1970 as La Zizanie , and freely translated into English by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Christmas was a festival unknown to the residents of the little Gaulish village, whose adventures took place circa 50 BC. Few childhood Christmases of the 1970s and 80s w...
A timely revisit of our 2022 Christmas special which celebrates Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, a classic of children’s literature and the childhood favourite of our producer, Nicky Birch. We are joined by the writer Una McCormack and Tanya Kirk, the Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections (1601-1900) at the British Library, who are both lifetime Streatfeild fans. Ballet Shoes was an immediate bestseller upon publication and the runner-up for the inaugural Carnegie Medal. It has never bee...
Writer and critic Matthew De Abaitua joins Andy, Una and Nicky to discuss Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930), the astounding first novel by Olaf Stapledon. The book is one of the founding texts of science fiction, a fact that has both assured its reputation and arguably restricted its readership, a conundrum we discuss during the show; certainly, few novels are so vast in scope or present the reader with such leaps of the imagination. Whatever you think you know about ...
Something a little different this week. Andy, Una and Nicky discuss the novel Transit by Rachel Cusk, the second part of her award-winning Outline trilogy. Outline, the first volume was published in 2014, with Transit following two years later and then finally Kudos in 2018; our conversation encompasses all three books. Backlisted began not long after Outline was published, and in the time we’ve been on air, the novels have gone from being well-reviewed new titles to bestsellers to backlist clas...
For this year's Halloween episode, we take a windswept walk across the Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — not as a tale of doomed romance, but as a novel steeped in gothic horror, mystery and the supernatural. With our resident spooky authorities, Andrew Male and Laura Varnam, we explore the book’s darker undercurrents, ghostly visitations, and the uncanny wildness of Brontë’s imagination. There's also lots of Brontë backstory - so whether you're a lifelong devotee or only k...
Backlisted re-airs a joyous 2019 episode as a tribute to the late Jilly Cooper, focusing on her romance novel "Imogen." Hosts Andy and John, along with guests Daisy Buchanan and Dr. Ian Patterson, delve into Cooper's unique blend of humor, domestic detail, and groundbreaking portrayal of women and sex. The discussion also touches on the enduring appeal of her "bonkbuster" novels, comparing her style to Austen and Wodehouse, and includes reflections on the works of J.L. Carr and children's author John Burningham.
Writer Jason Hazeley joins Andy, Una and Nicky for a celebratory investigation - or investigative celebration - of All the Devils Are Here , the ungovernable literary brainchild of the late David Seabrook and a book we first discussed on Backlisted in April 2016. (You can still find episode 11, which featured critic Rachel Cooke, in the usual places.) This extraordinary work of non-fiction was republished in the wake of our show, since which time it has gone on to find a whole new audience of re...
Emmy Award-winning writer David Quantick ( Veep , The Thick of It ) joins Andy and Una for a discussion of Marc Behm's surreal thriller The Eye of the Beholder (1980). David last appeared on Backlisted almost ten years ago, waaay back on episode 5. On that occasion he brought with him Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson. It is no exaggeration to say The Eye of the Beholder gives that novel a run for its money in terms of sheer audacity, originality and mystery. Marc Behm himself wa...
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan (1971), the second Earthsea novel, is the subject of this episode. Joining Una and Andy is writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce, current Children’s Laureate. We look at how Le Guin shifts her story from the adventures of Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea to the inner life of Tenar, a girl taken to serve as High Priestess in the labyrinthine tombs. We also consider why, despite her achievements, Le Guin is not more widely known today, and yet her work has clearly shaped ge...
Leonora Carrington's charming and surreal novel The Hearing Trumpet (1976, probably) is the subject of this episode. Joining Una, Andy and Nicky is author and lecturer Dr Paul March-Russell, who offers insights into all aspects of Carrington's career. Leonora Carrington lived a long and extraordinary life; we discuss the ways in which her biography intersects not just with her books, but her remarkable paintings and sculptures, which at auction now fetch tens of millions of dollars. How did the ...
Dave Haslam and Melanie Williams join us to discuss A Taste of Honey (1958), Shelagh Delaney's first play, written and produced when the author was not yet 20 years old. To describe this as an expert panel would be an understatement: Dave Haslam is a former resident DJ at the legendary Haçienda club in Manchester and the author of Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City ; Melanie Williams is a professor of film studies at UEA whose most recent book was the BFI monograph on the big sc...
The writer Alan Moore is the subject of this long-awaited episode. Joining Andy and Una is the author and dramatist Simon Guerrier, who has chosen The Ballad of Halo Jones , Moore's collaboration with illustrator Ian Gibson. It was first appeared in weekly instalments in the British comic 2000 AD , before being published in omnibus form by Titan Books in 1986. It tells the story of a bored teenage girl looking for a way out of her humdrum 30th-century existence. For reasons discussed in the show...
Angel (1957) by the English writer Elizabeth Taylor, is the subject of this special episode - and, as you'll hear, the next episode of Locklisted too.* Joining Andy and Una for a hotly disputed umpteenth appearance on the podcast is our guest, the critic and broadcaster Andrew Male. We last featured Elizabeth Taylor in 2019 when we discussed The Soul of Kindness (1964) on episode 102. Now we are revisiting this most Backlisted of authors, with perhaps her most Backlisted novel, Angel , about a c...
Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them (1948) is the subject of this episode, almost ten years since Backlisted covered the same author's classic debut Lolly Willowes (1926). Joining Andy, Una and Nicky to discuss this magnificent and inimitable historical novel - and to consider what, if anything, we have learnt during the last decade - is our friend Tanya Kirk, author, editor and the Librarian of St John's College, Cambridge; Tanya appeared on previous episodes about Winifred Holtb...
Books we think you might enjoy on a plane, by the pool or in the park. Andy, Nicky and our old friend Una McCormack discuss the following fantastic beach reads - Birch reads? - and a novel from Backlisted's own backlist: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre); The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, trans. Adriana Hunter (Penguin); Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes (Faber); and The Lowlife by Alexander Baron (Faber). This is Backlisted's 10th anniversary year, so over the summer, we'll be r...
The wonderful Nina Stibbe, award-winning novelist and diarist, joins us for a discussion of Sue Townsend's classic comic creation. When it was first published in 1982, the confidential journal of Leicester's foremost teenage poet and intellectual was an overnight success, eventually going on to become the best-selling British novel of the 1980s. Four decades on, we can see it for what it truly is: a masterclass in the art of writing comic prose and a work of political satire that stealthily made...
To discuss The Image of Her (1966) by Simone de Beauvoir we are joined by writer and translator Lauren Elkin, whose previous books include Flâneuse: Women Walk the City , Scaffolding and Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art . Best known as the author of The Second Sex , Beauvoir was also a prolific novelist. In The Image of Her —newly translated by Elkin after more than forty years— reads like a dispatch from the smooth surface of a life coming quietly undone. Laurence is a successful adv...
Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time , joins John and Andy for a tour of Monkey King: Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, the sixteenth-century fable widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese novels ever written, newly translated by Julia Lovell. The Monkey King's powers include shape-shifting, immortality and "being incredibly rude"; listeners of a certain age will be familiar with his legendary exploits - and those of his travelling companions Pigsy, Sandy and Tripitaka -...
“A masterpiece I don’t fully understand—and don’t need to.” This week’s book is The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, a bold, baffling, and darkly funny novel that has confounded and enchanted readers since its publication in 1995. Joining us to explore it is Chris Chibnall, award-winning screenwriter, playwright, and now novelist, best known for Broadchurch and Doctor Who , and author of the new detective novel Death at the White Hart . Written in the wake of Ishiguro’s Booker-winning The Remains o...
Elif Shafak and Lyndsey Stonebridge join John and Andy for a discussion of the life and work of Hannah Arendt, the historian and philosopher whose books include The Human Condition , The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . This being Backlisted, we approach Arendt's formidable oeuvre and truly extraordinary biography via an intriguing route: her poetry. The book Elif and Lyndsey have chosen for this special episode is What Remains: The Collect...
