Author Nicola Barker: "we are all weirdos" | Culture with Tanjil Rashid
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The experimental novelist on finding God, being "a misfit" and her return to writing.
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Nicola Barker is "has broken the mould so many times it's almost beyond repair".
She's a post-punk literary anarchist who writes from the peripheries of the UK.
Her experiments with narrative form have won her many plaudits, including the Goldsmith's Prize for literary fiction, which the New Statesman partners with.
Barker joins Tanjil Rashid on the New Statesman culture podcast to discuss her latest novel, Tony Interrupter: a comedy about art, virality, chaos, and the surprising impact of freak events in Kent.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:04.8 | Do you feel that you're a misfit? |
| 0:06.7 | Of course. |
| 0:07.8 | Do you not feel I'm a misfit? |
| 0:09.9 | Do you feel you're a misfit? |
| 0:13.4 | He evades the question. |
| 0:16.0 | No, I'm a weirdo too. |
| 0:18.2 | I'll just admit it. |
| 0:19.1 | So we're a team. |
| 0:20.7 | We are. |
| 0:21.2 | We found each other here. |
| 0:24.3 | I don't know. |
| 0:24.6 | I don't know where to go from there. |
| 0:30.1 | I've deconstructed the interview. |
| 0:32.1 | You've deconstructed the interview. |
| 0:37.8 | Hello, I'm Tangel Rashid, and this is the New Statesman podcast. |
| 0:43.5 | At this magazine, we talk a lot about Britain's neglected regions, places you don't often |
| 0:49.2 | hear about in our metropolitan literary culture. |
| 0:52.4 | One writer bucks the trend. |
| 0:56.5 | My guest today is a rebel, an author who defies description. My predecessor as culture editor here Tom Gatti described her as having |
| 1:02.4 | broken the mould so many times that it's almost beyond repair. She's a post-punk literary |
| 1:08.4 | anarchist who writes from the country's peripheries. |
... |
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