Hello, welcome along to writers' routine.

This week, chatting to Joe Thomas.

His novels focus on tough, gritty places, and he's won awards for increasing social

awareness in them too.

He mixes fiction, fact, crime,

high literary stuff in there as well. We talk about how having a child has warped his routine a little bit.

Also why he likes to get out of his house to write and surround himself in learning.

And as the author of the critically acclaimed Sao Paulo Quartet, when did the

idea of telling these stories actually come to him? I lived in Sao Paulo from 2002 to 2012,

roughly basically. On 2006, on the Mother's Day weekend, there was a kind of rebellion that occurred from the big criminal

gang, the PCC in Sao Paulo.

The World Cup was that year, 2006, of course, and the PCC gang are mainly involved in drugs,

but all sorts of other criminal activity.

The leaders are kept in prison, or they're in prison, not kept in prison,

that sounds like, they're imprisoned, they're in jail.

And they demanded from the authorities, so they requested flat screen TVs for their

cells to watch the, the World Cup.

And this request was denied.

And so, as a consequence, at least this is the superficially, superficial narrative.

As a consequence, the gang, the foot soldiers of the gang in South Island kind of tore the place up,

create some chaos.

There is more on the way with Joe Thomas in this week's writer's routine.

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