Backstage with Eileen AtkinsHow does the writing we love create the roles we perform?Join Dame Eileen Atkins, stage and TV star, three-time Olivier Award winner and screenwriter of ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ and ‘Mrs Dalloway’ talk about her autobiography, Will She Do? She tells Lucy Scholes how she created the first entertainment about servants inspired by her parents’ lives, how a casting director got her addicted to the books of Virginia Woolf and how women in repertory theatre felt in charge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Virago Books

OurShelves: Backstage with Dame Eileen Atkins

Donna Coonan is Editorial Director of the Virago Modern Classics list, which was set up 1978 to demonstrate the existence of a necessary canon of women’s writing and to challenge the sometimes narrow definition of what a ‘classic’ is. Since 2005, she has brought over 200 new books including those by Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym and Patricia Highsmith to this beloved list with its iconic green spines.Join Lucy Scholes as she fangirls with Donna about the VMCs and find out how she does the detective work of a classics editor; how Virago reassessed the legacy of Daphne du Maurier, championing her as a vital 20th century author when she’d been dismissed as a writer of romances; how Valley of the Dolls challenges the definition of a classic; and how she’s bringing prescient, ground-breaking Black American authors like Gayl Jones, Ann Petry and Gloria Naylor back into print. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rescue with Donna Coonan

How do you say ‘Me Too’ in Chinese – when it’s banned on social media?吕频 Lü Pin, Chinese feminist activist featured in Awakening by Rachel Vogelstein and Meighan Stone, talks to Lucy Scholes about her work challenging gender-based violence in a state without freedom of speech or protest. Through ingenuity, humour and sheer determination, she says, because ‘nobody’ – not even the Chinese government – ‘can control everything’. She remembers the first time she read something which taught her to be proud of being a woman; champions the pop star singing about domestic violence in China; and argues for the importance of anger in fighting her cause. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves: Awakening with 吕频 Lü Pin

How do we get through the difficult days?Susie Boyt, author and theatre director, got through the pandemic by walking for miles listening to poetry podcasts to replace the conversations she’d have with friends about books. Here, she tells Lucy Scholes how she had a feminist awakening watching a play where women honoured the horror their friend went through; the sheer joy between grandmother and granddaughter in her latest novel Loved and Missed; and why Judy Garland is her ultimate heroine. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves: Heroics with Susie Boyt

How can we find light in the dark?Oceanographer, marine biologist and author of Below the Edge of Darkness, Edie Widder’s life has been as fascinating as the animals she studies, and she speaks with irresistible wonderment about watching them communicate with bioluminescence in the depths of the sea. Join her conversation with Lucy Scholes on squirting squids, being the only woman on the ship and overcoming sexism in science with the example of her extraordinary mother. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves: Hope with Dr Edith Widder

Is writing a muscle? Kamila Shamsie, prize winning novelist, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Granta Best of Young British author, talks to Lucy Scholes about her great-aunt, Attia Hosain, whose books are newly reissued with her introductions on the Virago Modern Classics list, and how she once took her aside to say, ‘Never stop writing’. In their conversation, they traverse the psychological journey of refugees, remember how reading Woolf for the first time felt like coming up for air and ask how much courage it takes to write. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves: Courage with Kamila Shamsie

Can solitude be a source of inspiration?In this bonus episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson talks to Lucy Scholes about her latest novel, Jack and its place in the Gilead quartet. Exploring the idea of solitude, Marilynne speaks with characteristic insight about living with her characters as she writes and the absence they leave behind.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Marilynne Robinson

Who is your feminism for?Austin Channing Brown was named by parents who deliberately wanted people to presume their daughter was a white man when applying for jobs. Now a speaker and writer working for Racial Justice in the US and the author of I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, she explains how her hopefulness is not rooted in white people but in the work. With candour, insight and a lot of laughter, she tells Lucy why her recent bestseller’s royalty check only reinforced her resolution that economic success should not determine her feminist principles, reveals that ‘a woman becoming herself’ is her favourite fiction genre and raves about the beauty of textile art that recalls our foremothers.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Austin Channing Brown

What can we learn from African women’s movements?If you knew about the women who fought a freedom war in 1914 Nigeria, would it alter your view of feminist history? Chibundu Onuzo, award-winning author and performer, talks to Lucy Scholes about her new novel Sankofa. Join a conversation of riotous laughs and deep thinking as Chibundu tells Lucy about the economics of cheating, Ugandan Mwenkanokano and why the Nigerian Elena Ferrante is her bible.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Chibundu Onuzo

Would you become a surrogate mother?Publishing her first novel over the age of fifty, Susan Spindler writes brilliantly about post-menopausal life in her thriller Surrogate. Join her and Lucy Scholes as they discuss why older women are forced to emulate fertility or risk being called a ‘hag’ and to hear them talk about mothers in recent literature – from joyful physical intimacy to inherited trauma and the curious cases of women addicted to pregnancy.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Susan Spindler

How can you create your own world when this one doesn’t serve you?Join as we radically restructure myths, stories and genres – from the American West to fairy tales and nineties pop icons. C. Pam Zhang is author of How Much of These Hills is Gold, longlisted for the Man Booker and Rathbones Folio Prizes and one of Barack Obama’s books of the year. She talks to Lucy Scholes about defiantly imagining herself into erased histories of Asian Americans, sexy feminists and how eavesdropping inspires her writing.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with C Pam Zhang

Join Lucy Scholes as she has a frank, funny and fascinating talk with Amanda Coe, author of three novels, and BAFTA award winning scriptwriter of Black Narcissus – for which she also wrote the introduction to the new Virago Modern Classics edition. Amanda talks about adapting novels for screen (like fancying someone on the first date) and explores the feminist texts that changed her life, from the profundity of The Golden Notebook (like making you wear a sanitary pad for 600 pages) to the levity of Heartburn (proving middle aged women do laugh).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Amanda Coe

How can reading rewire your brain?After a childhood spent calling Henry James her ‘dude’ and Evelyn Waugh her ‘friend’ R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries, talks to Lucy Scholes about how determinedly reading more people of colour and queer voices helps reconfigure her internal world to match her external world – where straight is not the default. Join her conversation with Lucy Scholes as they break down the myth of the selfish male artist and figure out how to talk about her latest book Kink, a collection of erotic short stories, with religious Asian parents.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with R. O. Kwon

How can you be a strong woman in a world that’s not built for you?Justine Cowan is an attorney used to fighting environmental cases against huge corporations but writing about her mother’s childhood in her first book, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames led her to uncover a very different injustice. She joins Lucy Scholes to talk about finding mother figures in chosen families, rewriting history from new perspectives and how, as a female lawyer in the American South, she overcame barriers by taking courage from her heroes.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Justine Cowan

How can we write a life unexpected?Author of seventeen novels, fourteen plays, theatre-maker, co-director of Fun Palaces and Stonewall writer of the year Stella Duffy OBE is an inspiration of hard-won wisdom and appetite for learning new things. She joins Lucy Scholes for a conversation about living without children in a pro-natalist society, how existentialism and yoga inform her writing and the time she met Patricia Highsmith - as well as why Bridgerton is brilliant.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

OurShelves with Stella Duffy

A monthly celebration of books, reading and writing brought to you by Virago Press, the international publisher of books by women.

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