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

My guest this week is a columnist who grew up in Ipswich and after various jobs in Britain and overseas embarked upon an academic and later a journalistic career.

She has written for a range of publications, Marxism Today, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Mail, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.

She is a feminist, once-embastised by Jermaine Greer for her big hair and fuck-me-shoes, and a single mother who has had three daughters in three different decades.

She stood as an independent candidate for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington in the 2010 UK general election and was the winner of the All-World Prize for journalism in 2019.

More recently, she's made waves for her decision to depart waves with The Guardian, a publication she had written columns for for decades.

That came following criticism of her writing on trans issues.

Reflecting on her decision to leave the paper, she said,

The personal becomes political at the moment you never feel clean enough. I was always somewhat

inappropriate there. My guest today is Suzanne Moore. So thank you very much joining us today.

We're delighted to have you socially distanced, but in the spectator office. On this podcast, to begin with, we ask everyone the same

question. Some have said it's a leading question, which is, would you describe yours as a happy

childhood? No. I think it was, it was quite fragmented. My mother got married and divorced many times and I think she was

of a generation of women who were trying to find some sort of freedom through getting different men

and it didn't work out. But I had, I don't have bad feelings towards her.

I think she did the best she could in the circumstances she was in.

But no, it wasn't happy a lot of the time.

But when I told her that, she told me it was.

So that's quite difficult to deal with.

...