Paul Harding with Nihal Arthanayake
Ask Penguin
Penguin Books UK
4.1 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on the Penguin Podcast, Nihal Arthanayake is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Paul Harding.
Paul joins us to discuss his brand new novel, This Other Eden.
We also hear how the pressure of winning a prize affects the writing process, why Paul prefers to keep his personal politics side-lined in his fiction, what success means to him, and why he sometimes sits to read the Oxford English Dictionary
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Brought to you by Penguin. |
| 0:12.9 | Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing. |
| 0:19.4 | I'm Nihal Arthur Nyka and today I'm speaking to Paul Harding, |
| 0:23.1 | the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, |
| 0:25.8 | and in a former life, drummer of 90s alternative rock group, Coldwater Flat. |
| 0:31.4 | His latest novel, This Other Eden, has just been released, |
| 0:35.1 | and I'm delighted to have a chance to talk to him about it, and of course, |
| 0:38.7 | his writing. Paul, welcome to the Penguin podcast. Oh, thank you kindly. It's a great, |
| 0:43.5 | great pleasure and honor to be here. A question, I'm sure you've been asked many times. What does |
| 0:48.0 | winning a Pulitzer Prize do to the level of expectation from within you. I get the level of expectation from without, |
| 0:56.8 | but what about from within you? You know, it's funny. I mean, it was so unexpected, but I quickly |
| 1:03.9 | learned that there are two reactions or ways that you should not perceive winning a Pulitzer Prize. And one is to act like |
| 1:12.6 | you deserve it. And the other is to act like you don't deserve it. You know, because you try to |
| 1:20.1 | unabashedly write a book that is good, right? And then if you are blessed with that kind of recognition, |
| 1:26.4 | you just don't want people to think, |
| 1:28.1 | why did we give it to that chump? |
| 1:30.7 | But then there's, you're right. |
| 1:32.3 | Afterwards, you know, one of the questions everybody starts asking is, how are you going to |
| 1:35.5 | follow up your Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel? |
| 1:38.8 | And you think, you know, if my biggest problem in life is figuring out how to follow up |
| 1:43.6 | my Pulitzer surprise winning debut. |
| 1:45.7 | Things are not too bad. |
... |
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