Meet the Writers Monocle Radio

The Berlin-based author and playwright was born in the then-USSR and emigrated to Germany in 1995. ‘Glorious People’, their second novel, now translated into English, was longlisted for the German Book Prize and won several others. Salzmann has since been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for 2024, the biggest prize for literature in Germany. 
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The British-Cambodian writer and editor initially wrote ‘The Ministry of Time’ – her gripping sci-fi rom-com debut – as a joke for a handful of friends. The genre-bending thriller, which explores themes including immigration and environmentalism, became an instant bestseller. Even before the novel landed on bookshelves last month, the BBC beat Netflix in a bidding war to turn the book into a TV drama. Kaliane Bradley tells Georgina Godwin about the obligation she felt to write a “serious” book about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, her work at Penguin Classics as an editor, and how her funny and fantastical debut came about.


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Announced this week is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. The recipient of this year’s award is ‘Kairos’ by German writer Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hoffman, who each take home half of the £50,000 prize money. Host Georgina Godwin speaks to the winning duo and the administrator of the prize, Fiammetta Rocco, who lifts the lid on the selection process. We also talk to Granta’s Sigrid Rausing, who reveals who is buying translated literature and what sells best.


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Award-winning Scottish author and editor at large at the ‘London Review of Books’, Andrew O’Hagan has spent the past decade working on his state-of-the-nation novel, ‘Caledonian Road’. Employing the traditions of Victorian writing, his research took him to the homes of Russian oligarchs, the Old Bailey and even a ship from Venice to Trieste. Here, O’Hagan talks about how libraries “saved” him, ghostwriting Julian Assange’s autobiography and his brief brushes with royalty.
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‘For me, beauty and disgust don’t really exist in binary.’ AK Blakemore’s discovery of tales of The Great Tarare, a French showman with an insatiable appetite, was the perfect setting for her to explore her love of the grotesque and abject. Shortlisted for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize, her novel ‘The Glutton’ explores the almost folkloric life of the soldier-turned-street performer, as he tours around France eating everything from nails and stones to snakes and puppies. Blakemore also talks about her childhood living on the 24th floor of a tower block in southeast London, experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, and the symbolic power of food in literature.
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“We left Iraq as Jews, and we arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” Acclaimed historian Avi Shlaim is a man with a complicated backstory as an Arab Jew. He has a very clear-eyed view of events leading up to the current crisis in the Middle East. He traces the origins of the conflict to antisemitism in the UK after the First World War and even to the Jews of Babylon 2,500 years ago. Shlaim tells us why he believes that accusations of antisemitism and anti-Zionism are being used to silence the critique of Israel’s practices, and why he considers Marilyn Monroe a “profound thinker”.
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