I'm I'm Welcome to Literary Friction on NTS.

I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host, Octavia Bright.

Hi, Octavia.

Hi, Carrie.

Today, our show might sound a little different, and that is because we are coming to you live from the Cheltenham Literature Festival, one of the big three book festivals in the UK. I think I just made up that term. I like it. But I'm going to go with it. I think it's true. Yeah, I think it's true. Edinburgh. Hey, Cheltenham. It's a big deal. And we are so happy to be the podcast in residence this year. So, Octavia, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about what we're going to be doing today? I do, but I also feel like we should tell them that we're not just coming to them from Cheltenham. We're coming to them from the back of a car in Cheltenham currently. Do you think we should tell them that? I do. I feel like it needs to be said. We're in the

backseat of Carrie Annette's car. It's great. Windows are quite foggy and it's getting dark.

So we're rushing through this. It's very quiet. It is very quiet in the car. That's why we're here.

It's kind of an ideal recording situation. But we're going to bring you a bit of an unusual show today.

It's going to be in three parts. So first you'll hear the interview we did with Karin Havelin

and Eleanor Tom for an event we chaired with them called A Body of Work. They've both written

really powerful books about endometriosis. And then we also chaired an event with Ayel at Gundagoshen and Rosie

Prize called Me Too in Fiction, and their books both explore sexual assault. So we hope you

enjoy that. And then the third part is made up of a bunch of vox pops that we did with all kinds

of writers that we managed to bump into in the green room and ask them to make... Slash, a cost. Oh yeah, maybe it costs. No, I think we were gentle. No, no. We were nice. We asked them to recommend books that they've been reading recently, and we have a really great selection of things that everybody mentioned, really diverse and inspiring list. And all recorded on the Zoom mic that we're speaking into right now. Yep, which was lent to us by the very wonderful Jesse Rocha. Jesse, thank you so much. Yeah, and it has something called a dead kitten on the top. It does have a dead kitten on the top. It's not a mammal. It's made from plastic, fiber. I don't know. It's very, it's very cute, though. It's very fluffy. I would wear it as some sort of hat. Yeah, a mitton. It looks like a kind of mitten. It also makes the quite aggressive hardware underneath look a bit less alarming when you shove it in somebody's face. It is quite cute. Yeah, yeah. So anyway. We're having fun. We love our Zoom. We love our dead kitten. And we love all of you.

Yeah.

So first we will start with our interview with Karin and Eleanor, which we begin by introducing them. Karen Havlin is a writer and translator from Bergen in Norway,

and she has a bachelor's degree in French literature and gender studies from the University of Bergen

and the University of Paris, Sorbonne. She completed her MFA and fiction from

Columbia University in May 2013. Her work has been published both in Norwegian and in English,

and her first novel, Please Read This Leaflet Carefully, About One Young Woman's Experience with Chronic

Illness was published simultaneously in the US, the UK and Norway in spring of this year,

and that's the book that she's come to talk to us about today.

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