Beloved by Toni Morrison - rerun

Backlisted

Backlisted Podcast

Arts, Books, Leisure, Hobbies

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Beloved by Toni Morrison was first published in 1987 by Knopf, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, among many other prizes. In 2006, the New York Times declared Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years. and more recently it came second in the Guardians top 100 novels of all time. This show was recorded in 2019 and our guest is Preti Taneja a novelist, a teacher and an activist. She won the Desmond Elliot Prize for her first book, We That Are Young (2017), and her creative non-fiction work, Aftermath (2022) was based on her own experience of teaching in prison. In this episode John also enthuses about Lisa Blower’s sparkling story collection It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s published by Myriad Editions and Andy discovers the perfect holiday read in Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands. published by Weidenfeld. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Attention all passengers. The Uber ride for Jeff's rugby team will depart in five minutes from Platform 15. Your ride comes with six toilets and a refreshment's carriage that you'll empty within five minutes. Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber.
0:20.0	Trains on Uber.
0:22.2	Hello, it's Nicky.
0:23.3	And John, we're here to introduce one of our rerun episodes of Backlisted.
0:28.6	And this is one from seven years ago, from May 2019.
0:35.1	And it features the novel that was, I think, voted the second best book of all time.
0:41.3	No pressure. This is the second best book of all time. According to who?
0:46.3	In the recent poll, organized by The Guardian.
0:50.3	We don't know who the people were who voted. Maybe they're all backlisted listeners.
0:54.6	A lot of writers I know have voted in it. But the book is Tony Morrison's beloved, and our guest
1:00.5	was Pretty Ten Hedger who had at that point published one novel, We That Are Young, which had won
1:08.3	the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize. And she was to go on after,
1:13.9	according this podcast, to write another really extraordinary, quite harrowing book called
1:19.6	Aftermath. She was, when we talked to her, she was still running a prison writing program.
1:27.7	And it was one of the people who had been a pupil of hers,
1:31.7	ended up being the protagonist,
1:34.0	the person who, I think, murdered five people on the London Bridge attacks later on in 2019.
1:41.0	But her book about that whole process and about being a teacher and what things are going
1:45.9	wrong is a really, really, really remarkable book.
1:49.4	I talked about it on the podcast when it came out.
1:52.2	But this is all about Tony Morrison.
1:55.4	And I love this podcast because Pretty is so articulate.
	...

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