Show Notes
This month's show is about East and Southeast Asian identity in Britain. We spoke to journalist Helena Lee about East Side Voices, the anthology of writing she edited that celebrates the diversity of these voices in the UK. We also spoke to poet and writer Will Harris about the poem he contributed and some of the other pieces from the collection, which features writers including Mary Jean Chan, Sharlene Teo, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Catherine Cho. These essays and poems cover a range of experiences and settings, from the set of Harry Potter to the NHS frontlines, and seek to combat the absence of representation in British culture in which East and Southeast Asian lives are often, to use Salman Rushdie’s words, "visible but unseen". Listen in for readings, music, plus all the usual recommendations.
Recommendations: Octavia: Pisti, 80 rue de Belleville by Estelle Hoy Helena: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda Will: Ultimatum Orangutan by Khairani Barokka Carrie: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Find a list of all recommended books at: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/feb-2022-east-side-voices-with-helena-lee-and-will-harris Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/litfriction Email us: [email protected] Tweet us & find us on Instagram: @litfriction
This episode is sponsored by Picador: https://www.panmacmillan.com/picador
More from Literary Friction
So it turns out, we missed talking to each other about books, and we missed you! And thanks to some vital sponsorship from our friends at Faber Books, we are BACK, baby, for this extra long one-off Year in Review episode.
It's time for our usual Year in Review show, but seeing as this is also our last EVER episode (sob!), we're shaking things up a little to bring you a bit of a decade in review as well, so we can look back over our highlights from ten wonderful years of Literary Friction.
What does it mean, to pursue a life of your own? And what is art and literature's role in figuring out what that might look like? This month we're delighted to be talking to writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, whose latest book Radical: A Life of My Own is both a personal lexicon and a memoir, which thinks deeply about what it would mean to truly forge a life of one’s own.
Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Maral, who asked us to do an episode about our friendship, because she’s interested in how our (very!) different personalities align. We thought it might be a little self-indulgent to spend a whole episode talking about us specifically, so we’re also going to return to the theme of friendship more broadly, and talk about some of our favourite books about friends.
How do the people and things we desire shape our identities? And how do you render the physical intensity of desire on the page? Author K Patrick joins us in thinking about desire this month - we spoke to K about their debut novel Mrs. S, which tells the story of a young Australian who arrives at an elite English all-girls boarding school for a job and ends up having a life-changing affair with the headmaster's wife. It's a sensual portrait of queer desire, and the transformative power of lust and longing, which is why we wanted to revisit the theme of desire in this show. So, listen in for all the usual recommendations, our favourite writing about desire, and why desire is crucial to the act of reading itself.