In this edition of the Book Talk podcast Ryan Van Winkle interviews Kirsty Logan about her debut collection of short stories, discusses parkour with novelist and poet Tim Sinclair and imagines the Scotland of the future with sci-fi author Ken MacLeod.
The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales is the debut short story collection from former New Writers Award recipient Kirsty Logan. Written over the course of five years, the stories are set in locations as diverse as 1920s New Orleans, the Australian Outback and Paris.
Kirsty reads her moving short story The Light Eater and discusses how writing helped her to process difficult emotions.
Australian novelist and poet Tim Sinclair talks about his latest young adult novel, Run. Written in concrete poetry, where words function both linguistically and visually, the book explores the world of parkour, where participants “move through the urban environment in a way that doesn’t allow for boundaries”. When ego gets involved, trouble quickly follows.
Finally, acclaimed sci-fi writer Ken MacLeod discusses his new book about “flying saucers, hidden races and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution”. Descent follows the teens and twenties of an ordinary Greenock man whose bad behaviour is blamed on a possible alien encounter.
Moving from science fiction to science fact, Ken also explains his involvement with Hope Beyond Hype, a comic book he wrote in collaboration with OptiStem, an EU-funded stem cell research project. The comic was downloaded over 100,000 in times in the first few days following release; listen now to discover how the book was developed.
Podcast contents
00:00-00:53 Introduction
00:53-09:20 Kirsty Logan interview
09:20-16:30 Tim Sinclair Interview
16:30-30.00 Ken MacLeod interview
