Steve Toltz and Kate Clanchy - books podcast

Steve Toltz's second novel, Quicksand, has taken him seven years to write and features a human disaster-zone, suicide-bent and accident-prone, whose first misfortune was to be excised from the Australian writer's Booker-shortlisted debut, A Fraction of the Whole. Has any writer ever inflicted more calamity on a character? Toltz joins us to explain why he subjected Aldo to so so much grief, how the novel was influenced by his own experience of paralysis, and how the novel is really about the making of art. Then we meet Kate Clanchy, whose first short story collection has been descirbed as a "series of literary handgrenades". - surprisingly, perhaps, for someone who is often categorised as a writer of commercial women's fiction. She tells us about defying commercial pressure
and writing about voices from the edge.

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