Marlon James and Neil Gaiman

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From the appeal of trickster gods Anansi and Loki to the joy of comics and fantasy: Booker prize winner Marlon James and Neil Gaiman, author of the book American Gods which has been turned into a TV series, talk writing and reading with Matthew Sweet in a conversation organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the British Library.

Neil Gaiman is an author of books for children and adults whose titles include Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Coraline, and the Sandman graphic novels. He also writes children's books and poetry, has written and adapted for radio, TV and film and for DC Comics. Marlon James is the author of the Booker Prize winning and New York Times bestseller A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women, John Crow's Devil and his most recent - Black Leopard, Red Wolf - which is the first in The Dark Star Trilogy in which he plans to tell the same story from different perspectives.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

You can find a playlist called Prose and Poetry featuring a range of authors including Ian Rankin, Nadifa Mohamed, Paul Mendez, Ali Smith, Helen Mort, Max Porter, Hermione Lee, Derek Owusu, Jay Bernard, Ben Okri on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,
0:34.5	music, radio, podcasts. My name's Matthew Sweet, and this is the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:40.5	Two giants of contemporary fiction await you on this edition.
0:44.5	Neil Gaiman and Marlon James.
0:46.6	The audience begins after this message.
0:53.9	The human voice. Isn't it amazing? I'm Peter Brathwaid and I'm an opera singer, but I'm not here to tell you about my voice. I want to share my love for five extraordinary voices that have changed the way I sing and listen. Some you might know, others you probably won't, but they and their stories
1:12.1	all need to be heard. So have a listen to In Their Voices, my series of essays diving deep into
1:18.3	five voices that have hit me for six. The essay. Search for this series and all other available
1:24.6	episodes in BBC Sounds.
1:38.2	We're going to invoke new worlds of gods and monsters on this edition of Freethinking.
1:41.0	Devils that rustle beneath the earth.
1:45.6	Strange vampire-toothed babies attended by fairy spirits,
1:52.2	humiliated and forgotten deities now living on petty crime and the memory of how they were once venerated and adored. The programme is going to be busy with them, Thor Nunyunini,
1:58.5	the trolls of the blood swamp. They occupy two fictional spaces on two separate continents,
2:05.2	mapped by two major writers in a pair of massive books.
2:09.5	So what we're going to do now is construct a bridge between them,
2:13.5	and those authors, Neil Gaiman and Marlon James, are going to meet on it.
2:18.3	Marlon is the Booker Prize-winning author of a brief history of seven killings,
2:22.9	which has some of the same restless plenitude and strangeness as Black Leopard Red Wolf,
2:28.9	the first of his projected dark star trilogy set in the 13 kingdoms of an epic, mythic, African continent.
	...

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