Episode 25 - Anna Smaill Part 1

Anna Smaill is a New Zealand poet, academic and now Man Booker longlisted novelist. ----more----Her striking debut The Chimes has something of all parts of her career so far. There is music (Smaill trained as a violinist), lyricism (in evoking a world in which words have been replaced by melody), intelligence (in exploring grand narratives about connection, language, fundamentalism, technology, religion) and narrative drive: The Chimes is a love story and a dystopian mystery.

We met just before publication at RIBA. After some chatter about jet lag, we moved on to:

• memories of London, where Smaill began The Chimes, before returning home to New Zealand
• writing about London as an imaginative place
  
• the soundtracks of London and Tokyo
• German techno and Tokyo dancing vs Suede
• Smaill pitches The Chimes to Stephen Spielberg (kind of)
  
• the problems and danger of language in The Chimes
• memory, communication and extremism
• does The Chimes critique contemporary society?
• the pros and cons of technology
• the joy of reading
  
• linear narrative vs fractured memory
• Smaill's career anxieties
• The Chimes returning Smail to the joys of childhood reading
  
• from Phd thesis to novel writing
  
• Smaill's musical past - playing the violin
  
• crisis and giving up music
• music and identity
  
• music, emotion and the physical

I talk to Anna Smaill about her Man Booker longlist in The Independent: here.