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Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics

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Open Book: Gerald Murnane

21/01/2024

Gerald Murnane

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Gerald Murnane

In a rare radio interview, the Australian writer Gerald Murnane talks to Chris Power.

In a rare radio interview, the Australian writer Gerald Murnane talks to Chris Power about the reissue of his 1988 novel Inland and his writing life.

A special interview with the writer Gerald Murnane from his home in Goroke, Victoria in Australia. At 84 years old, Murnane has often been considered a front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and now new readers are finding their way to his work in increasing numbers as his 1988 novel Inland is being republished. A watershed entry in his bibliography and a difficult book to summarise, Inland captures some of the key traits of his work: exquisite writing, hypnotically powerful, and an obsessive attention to memory, childhood, reading, and the plains and grasslands of Victoria. Gerald rarely gives radio interviews but talks candidly to Chris Power about Inland, his writing process, his rejection of post-modernist labels and why he calls himself "not a well-read man". 

Chris is also joined by literary critics John Self and Mia Levitin to talk about some of the more interesting new books coming our way over the next few months and, the Scottish crime writer and academic Louise Welsh,  tells us why an old copy of Rilke's poetry is her Book I'd Never Lend.

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