Story Radio interviews Katie Willis, author of The Quiet Act of Loving Bones, published by Joan Publishing. We discuss bones, inspiration, the colour yellow, Russia and lucid dreaming.

"It is rare to come across a book that feels, at the same time, overwhelmingly strange and delightfully familiar. The Quiet Act of Loving Bones takes you into a world that is intimate and physical but also ghostly and ecstatic. You'll dance with it until you feel dizzy and transformed. I think Katie Willis has written a classic."

- Toby Litt

Katie Willis has written a beautifully precise dance anti-narrative. Her story is about the quiet defiance of using an interior world to navigate the complexities of embodied life. This book is for anyone who has been an adolescent or a dreamer.

- Laura Joyce

About Katie Willis

Katie Willis was a ballet dancer. She lives in London, close to a river, dividing her time between water and land, home and hospital. She writes about women and water, bodies and bones, and the stories that bones hold individually and collectively. This is her first novel.

This episode was produced by Tabitha Potts.

Music: dark piano-loop in f-minor 2 by Baz_Odink_NL -- https://freesound.org/s/442780/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

Eleven-and-a-half months ago, Mary didn’t know she had sisters. Now, at her home in Hove on England’s South Coast, they meet to scatter their mother Anne’s ashes.

This episode was written, directed, and produced by Kristin Burniston.

Kristin is a graduate of the MA Screenwriting program at the University of Arts London. In 2023, her short film scripts TREE and HAIRY MARY were selected by the City of Angels Film Festival, WOFFF (where HAIRY MARY placed 2nd), and Best-Script, London.

Recently, Kristin‘s script EGGS was made into a short film and will soon be released on to the festival circuit. Currently, Kristin is working on a London-based children’s animation, a crime fiction TV series, and a feature film script based on her menopausal rite-of-passage novel.

ANNE was published in 2022 in Brighton and Beyond: A West Hill Writers Anthology under the pseudonym “Maggie Winters”.

Mary read by Elly Tipping

María read by Iniki Mariano

Marguerite read by Florentia Antoniou

Lucas and Joe read by Theo Greenwood

Photo by Richard Burniston

Written, read and produced by Kristin Burniston

Sound recording by Holywell Studio

Sound design by Christopher Nathan

Post-production and mixing by Duncan Illing

Executive Producer – H Howard

As there are swearwords in this episode, we have rated it as Explicit.

Martin Nathan and Tabitha Potts interview writer Miki Lentin about his new novel Winter Sun, published by Afsana Press in 2024.

A nine-day winter break in Tenerife. Nothing is quite good enough. A son tries in vain to ask his ailing, elderly Irish Jewish father questions about their past before it is too late. The absurdity and hilarity of family holidays in the sun are brought to life in this sharp and fiercely honest novel that crosses borders, carrying the reader on a ride of childhood pain, a search for identity, and growth.

Miki talks about auto-fiction, package holidays, memory and meals in this fascinating interview.

Miki Lentin took up writing while travelling the world with his family a few years ago.

Miki completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck in 2020, and was a finalist in the 2020 Irish Novel Fair for his first book, Winter Sun.

Miki has been placed highly in competitions including Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize, Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Award, and Leicester Writes, and has been published in Litro, Storgy, Story Radio, MIR amongst others.

In 2022 he brought out a collection of short stories with Afsana Press, Inner Core, that cover death, anxiety, masculinity, family and children and social good. The book was called 'consistently enthralling... funny, moving and disturbing in equal measure' by Francis Gilbert, author of I’m a Teacher Get Me Out of Here.

Miki volunteers with refugee charity Breaking Barriers and with foodKIND in Greece, and dreams of one day running a café again.

Martin Nathan produced this episode.

Martin Nathan’s short fiction and poetry has appeared in a range of journals and his novel – A Place of Safety is published by Salt Publishing. His dramatic writing has been shortlisted for the Nick Darke award and the Woodward International Prize.

A student goes on a day trip to the seaside with his mum, and ends up learning a great deal more about himself - and her.

This story was written and read by Simon Roberts. Simon Roberts is currently based in West London and writes short stories and flash fiction. He was longlisted for the 2022 Fish Short Story Prize. He has read his work on Riverside Radio, London’s largest community radio station. Simon also writes for the theatre; his adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude will be produced by the Questors Theatre in 2024.

This episode was produced by Tabitha Potts, writer and podcaster. She recently received an Honourable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University and a First in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Read her short story collection here or visit her website.

Photo by Tabitha Potts.

Seaside sounds used in the recording were courtesy of Yarmonics on Freesound.org.

This episode contains some sexual swearwords so has been marked as explicit.

Listen to an interview with Jane Labous and hear her reading from her new novel, Past Participle, published by Afsana Press.

Dakar, Senegal, 1987: On a rainy night after a wild party, the British ambassador’s wife, Vivienne Hughes, is involve in a car crash. Her vehicle hits the motorbike of a young Senegalese doctor, Aimé Tunkara, killing him. Pleading diplomatic immunity, Vivienne and her husband flee to England.

Three decades later, Aimé’s little sister, Lily Tunkara, now a high-flying lawyer in Dakar, finds a photograph that compels her to investigate what really happened that rainy night. As Lily faces increasing hostility from the local community, she turns to Vivienne Hughes, the only remaining witness, but is either woman prepared for the truth to emerge?

Past Participle is the story of two women bound together by the faultlines of the past, a study of love and guilt, power and desire, retribution and forgiveness.

Jane Labous is an award-winning author, BBC journalist and broadcaster known for her frontline coverage of human rights and gender issues, always telling the powerful human stories behind the headlines.

Jane read English & French at Jesus College, Oxford, before working for the UK and international press and INGOs, most often out of Dakar, Senegal. This while developing her creative art as a writer, filmmaker and novelist, drawing on her insider knowledge of the aid sector and foreign journalism, and her unique experience of both expat and local family life in Ngor, Dakar.

Jane's credits span a vista of international outlets, including The Independent, Voice of America, Geographical, The LA Times, BBC Africa and BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent. She has also worked as a writer and filmmaker for aid/humanitarian agencies including the UN, the World Health Organisation, Save The Children, and Amnesty International. She has won the BBC Radio 4 and Royal Geographical Society Documentary Award, the Merck More than a Mother Media Recognition & Film Award for Francophone African Countries, and a European Journalism Centre Development Reporting Grant.

Her fiction has been longlisted for the Bath Novel Prize and the Santa Fé Writers' Project Literary Award.

This episode was produced by Tabitha Potts, writer and podcaster. She recently received an Honourable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University and a First in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Read her short story collection here or visit her website.

Tabitha Potts and Martin Nathan interview the lead curator and guest curator of the British Library’s blockbuster exhibition, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster. The exhibition runs until 25th February 2024 and tickets can be booked here.

The exhibition has been critically acclaimed with a five star review in The Telegraph, ‘a visually captivating treat’, and has been featured in The Guardian, The I Newspaper, Apollo Magazine and BBC Radio 4: Front Row to name a few.

We interviewed both curators about the process of assembling an exhibition featuring over 100 objects that spans the breadth of a genre as varied as Fantasy, from its roots in epics and mythology to contemporary writers like Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke.

Tanya Kirk, Lead Curator, Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900, has worked at the British Library for 16 years, currently as the leading expert on 300 years of the Library’s printed collections. She has curated six major exhibitions on topics including Gothic fiction, Shakespeare in performance, the British landscape in literature, science fiction and most recently, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. She is the editor of four Christmas-themed collections of short stories in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. With Matthew, she co-edited Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy (2023).

Matthew Sangster joined the University of Glasgow in 2016 and was promoted to Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History in 2022. Prior to that Matthew worked at the British Library cataloguing the archive of the Royal Literary Fund and contributing to the exhibitions The Worlds of Mervyn Peake in 2011 and Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands in 2012. Matthew is the author of Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021) and An Introduction to Fantasy (2023); co-director of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic (with Dimitra Fimi); and a founding co-editor (with Brian Attebery and Dimitra Fimi) of the Bloomsbury Perspectives on Fantasy series.

This episode was produced by Martin Nathan. Martin Nathan’s short fiction and poetry has appeared in a range of journals and his novel – A Place of Safety is published by Salt Publishing. His dramatic writing has been shortlisted for the Nick Darke award and the Woodward International Prize.

Episode cover image adapted from Carceri Etchings, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, (17501761) © British Library Board 

A young woman watches over her little sister in a polluted dystopian world where her scientific knowledge is her only weapon.

The story was written by Kae Hart. Kae is a university student who learned to speak by telling stories to everyone who would listen. The cashier at the local grocery store was her first fan. Since then, she has written stories, poems, and novels, and hopes to continue to do so.

This episode was produced by Tabitha Potts, writer and podcaster. She recently received an Honourable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University and a First in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Read her short story collection here or visit her website.

The photo used is by Kvaale at Morguefile..com.

S: Beautiful Romantic Piano by UNIVERSFIELD | License: Attribution 4.0

This Halloween, rather than encountering ghosts and ghouls, we explore the horrors of war. A little girl sneaks out of her family home to buy a birthday gift for her mother, a decision that changes her life forever.

Nicholas Batura lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, with his rad wife and their rescue pit bulls. When he’s not writing, he can be found on the jiu jitsu mats, or working through the secrets found in a bottle of wine.

This episode was produced by Tabitha Potts.

Photo by pawankawan at Morguefile.com

S: Beautiful Romantic Piano by UNIVERSFIELD | License: Attribution 4.0