Books Matter More Than Ever: A Conversation with Ian Patterson
The Shakespeare and Company InterviewShow Notes
In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Podcast, Adam Biles speaks with poet, translator and critic Ian Patterson about Books: A Manifesto, his passionate defence of reading in all its forms. What begins with the construction of a personal library in a converted coach house opens into a wide-ranging meditation on memory, loss, vulnerability and the profound role books play in shaping a life. Patterson discusses the anguish of parting with thousands of volumes, the intimacy of marked-up, well-lived-in books, and the politics of reading slowly in a culture addicted to speed. The conversation moves through genre snobbery, guilty pleasures, poetry’s complex rewards, the porous borders of contemporary literature, and Patterson’s experience translating the final volume of Proust—an immersion so deep it altered his own prose. It’s a warm, generous exploration of why books matter, how they remake us, and why defending them feels more urgent than ever.
Buy Books: A Manifesto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/books-a-manifesto
*
Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo’s Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.
Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Shakespeare and Company Interview
Jeanette Winterson joined us to celebrate the French edition of One Aladdin, Two Lamps, her book-length exploration of storytelling, built around One Thousand and One Nights. She recalls finding Shahrazad in her hometown library and the insight this led her to: that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact, and so rewrite her own story. The conversation moves from Freud, epigenetics and the plasticity of the brain to Manchester's Industrial Revolution and the lessons we failed to learn from it. Winterson traces AI from Ada Lovelace to Turing to today's tech moguls, making a case for cautious optimism and for calling it "alternative intelligence." She also argues for being present in the world, and looking at art without a phone.
“Childhood is once again a resource to be extracted at any cost.”
Dave Eggers joins us to discuss his 14th novel, Contrapposto, a six-decade love story between childhood friends Cricket and Olympia, illustrated with his own drawings. Eggers traces the book's twenty-year gestation, the moment Olympia's character unlocked its structure, and why he gave Cricket his own boyhood fantasy of being "apprenticed" as a young artist. The conversation ranges widely: the decline of art-school access and the pier-side art collective he's launched in San Francisco; his literacy nonprofit 826 Valencia and its typewriter-obsessed students; and a candid, sometimes fiery take on AI's effect on writing, translation, and education, including an anecdote from his visit to OpenAI's offices.
In the second episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist Megan Nolan to discuss Illusions by Ruth Rehmann, in a new translation by Rob Madole, the latest title in the Faber Editions imprint.
Amit Chaudhuri joins Adam Biles to discuss his new novel Chateau Rouge, set not in the postcard Paris of Hemingway and Midnight in Paris, but in the neighbourhood around Gare du Nord — a Paris that resists being known, curated, or confirmed. Chaudhuri talks about writing against the "already known" city, drawing on Roland Barthes and the idea of "heritage modernity" to explain why he wanted to deconstruct Paris's status as a museum-piece rather than a lived-in place. He discusses his narrator's disorientation on arrival, the subtle presence of race and visibility in the book, and how global events — the Gilets Jaunes, the Notre Dame fire — pass through the novel as lived, unfinished moments rather than history. The conversation turns, too, to marriage: how a decades-old, unread copy of A Moveable Feast, gifted by his wife, becomes a quiet emotional throughline.