This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to Women with Balls, presented by Katie Balls.

Hello and welcome to Women with Balls, where I, Katie Balls, speak to today's Trailblazers.

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Lionel Shriver. Shriver is an American journalist, author and spectator columnist.

Her novel, we need to talk about Kevin, about a mother and her son who goes on to carry out a

high school massacre, won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. Her writing regularly touches on

current affairs and topics that can, at times, be considered taboo. She has spoken up on cultural

appropriation, suggesting that writers ought to be able to write from any perspective rather than just

the one they were born into. And she has also urged caution on writer diversity initiatives.

So, Lionel, thanks very much for joining us today. To begin on this podcast, we'd like to go back to your

early life, so what you were doing before you were in the public sphere. And you've said that, as a child,

you were born in North Carolina to a very religious family. And by the time you were 12, on Sunday

mornings, your father was literally dragging you into the car by the hair. Does that mean to say that a religious

upbringing actually had the opposite of the desired effect on you? Well, it inoculated me against

religion. I think I am incapable of converting to any faith. I think that that skepticism also extends to politics because I don't tend to join

churches. I'm not especially party political. I'm averse to joining groups of any sort, come

to think of it. So actually, having a faith system of any sort of something that you are naturally drawn away

from? I like the idea of having principles, and I like the idea of having a coherent way of looking at

the world, although I think it's important always to be able to make exceptions in the interests of

practicality, for example.

And what was it like growing up in a religious family where you are in a way the odd one out

because you're not part of that sect?

I wasn't the odd one out.

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