The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Omar Musa, winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Award, joins us to discuss Fierce Land, a ghost story that travels from Kuala Lumpur and the Bornean rainforest to Sydney, Los Angeles, and nineteenth-century Venice. Following siblings Roz and Harun on a childhood trip into the jungle with their father, the novel asks how we mourn someone we loved who also did terrible things. Musa opens with a thunderous reading in the voice of the forest itself, then talks about Max Porter’s mentoring, Malaysia’s turbulent 1998 to 2018, what Conrad got wrong about jungles, and Australia’s “willful amnesia.” He explores hauntology, the Pontianak myth, and the poem he translated into sixteen indigenous Bornean languages, set against the sound of sap moving in a thousand-year-old tree. Plus: free will versus fate, grief, and a healthy fear of the forest.Buy Fierceland: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/fierceland*Omar Musa is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist, rapper and poet. He has written two novels (including Fierceland), three books of poetry, five hip-hop records, and two plays, Since Ali Died and The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio), with cellist Mariel Roberts Musa. Fierceland won the Miles Franklin Literary Award (Australia’s most prestigious literary award) and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. He has had several solo exhibitions of his woodcuts, including his most recent, The Hurt Business. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Best Australian Stories and Best of Australian Poems.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.

Meena Kandasamy joins Adam Biles to discuss Fieldwork as a Sex Object, her fearless new novel about Amy Chaturvedi, the avowedly communist daughter of wealthy Brahmin parents whose life unravels when a pornographic deepfake of her goes viral. Kandasamy explains why she made Amy an “imperfect victim,” and examines the political economy of online hate: paid trolls, WhatsApp pile-on groups, and soft-porn accounts that quietly turn far-right. She reads from the novel, reflects on how When I Hit You became a “handbook of divorce” in India, and shares her worries about how a story of Indian misogyny lands in the West. The conversation also covers writing for the “reel generation” spotting AI slop, and why a novel must always have grey areas.Buy Fieldwork as a Sex Object: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/fieldwork-as-a-sex-object*Dr Meena Kandasamy FRSL is a poet and provocateur who has spent two decades triggering online trolls. She has been translated into more than 20 languages. Her previous novel, When I Hit You, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize, Jhalak Prize and Hindu Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It was also Book of the Year in the Financial Times, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Irish Times. Her viral poetry collection, Ms Militancy, is a symbol of feminist revolt across South Asia. In 2022, she was awarded the PEN Germany Prize for being a ‘fearless fighter for human rights.’ She has two sons.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.

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. Buy One Aladdin Two Lamps here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/one-aladdin-two-lamps-2*Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.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.

“Childhood is once again a resource to be extracted at any cost.” Filmmaker-turned-legislator Beeban Kidron joined us to discuss Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. Kidron traces her path from directing documentaries to entering the House of Lords in 2012 (the same year smartphones became affordable enough for parents to hand to children) and how a strange, silent moment with four teenage girls in her kitchen launched a fourteen-year campaign. She unpacks the deliberate design choices behind addictive notifications and CSAM failures, and discusses why she focused her fight on children's rights as a strategic, less polarising lever. The conversation covers tech's grip on governments from Starmer to Trump, and considers how the industry's "free" business model is quietly reversing 150 years of social progress: from child labour laws to a generation working, unpaid, for the attention economy.Buy Users: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/users-3*BARONESS BEEBAN KIDRON is a global authority on digital regulation and accountability and is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment. She has played a determinative role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across the world. Baroness Kidron sits as a crossbench peer in the UK’s House of Lords, and is founder and former Chair of the 5Rights Foundation. She serves on the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and is a former member of the UN Broadband Committee. She is a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics, where she chairs the Digital Futures for Children research centre, and is an advisor to the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. Before she became a peer, Baroness Kidron was an award-winning film director. She co-founded the charity Filmclub (now Into Film) in 2006, and was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2012.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.

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. Buy Contrapposto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/contrapposto-3*Dave Eggers is the author of many books for adults and kids. He’s the founder of McSweeney's and the co-founder of 826 Valencia, and the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centers. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he was recently awarded the Newbery Medal for his all-ages book, The Eyes & the Impossible.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.