Hi Namalanta Combo here with some very exciting news.

Dear Daughter is back for a new series.

I'm putting together a handbook to life for daughters everywhere

full of stories and advice to help navigate life.

That's Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service.

Find it wherever you get your BBC podcast. Welcome to the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service.

It's become fashionable to talk about fiction as storytelling.

And why worry about this, especially if someone says to me,

all you are are marvelous storytellers, and you think think I don't think that's true because

there was so much silence at home. This is in the studio the series that takes you

inside the process of fascinating creative minds from around the globe.

I'm Helen Cullen and for this edition I spend time with Columb Tobin, one of the world's most

celebrated contemporary authors.

Someone could say that, well, what are you if you're not a storyteller?

And then you could say, well, I'm a literary novelist, but that sounds awful.

That sounds really pretentious. That sounds ridiculous, a literary novelist. And so no matter what

you do, you're stuck with this idea that at the basis of our humanity is the idea that people tell stories.

I suppose I'm implicated in this despite my effort not to be a storyteller because I think

storyteller sounds loose, it sounds unstructured, it sounds tedious and I'm desperately trying not to be tedious.

Originally from Enescorthy in County Wexford, Ireland,

Colin published his first novel, The South in 1990 after initially embarking on a career as a journalist.

Since then he has been nominated four times for the prestigious Booker Prize,

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