A Room Of Your Own

This week I’m joined by musician and artist Susan O’Neill. We had a wonderfully in-depth conversation about the creative process, and particularly the environments that have inspired her to compose music. We also dive deep into what it means to collect and gather objects around us, and how those objects – particularly the books that we pick up for ourselves or have gifted to us - come to tell a story about our lives.   Susan recently released an album called Now In A Minute, which I’d thoroughly recommend finding on youtube, spotify, or on her website susanoneill.ie [http://susanoneill.ie]

This week I talked to author, podcaster and comedian Christopher Beanland. His work spans a huge range of subjects, and seems to really reflect a life spent pursuing his own interests. He’s written a number of books exploring and celebrating favourite public spaces in the city including Lidos and City Parks, as well as two novels – Spinning Out of Control and The Wall In The Head.   In this conversation, we jump straight into talking about what it means to lead a ‘creative lifestyle’ and making sure that your work follows your interests, before moving on to the power of buildings to shape our lives. Check out Christopher’s work either through his website: https://christopherbeanland.com/ [https://christopherbeanland.com/] Or on Instagram @christopherbeanland [https://www.instagram.com/christopherbeanland/]

This week I talked to poet, novelist and performance artist Joelle Taylor. Joelle is the author several works of poetry, including C+NTO – for which she won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2021 – which is both a memorial of and a tribute to the places and people that were part of the butch culture of the 90s in London. She has most recently published a novel – The Night Alphabet – which expands horizons and narratives to tell the story of violence done to women, weaving together narratives from the past with imagined futures to tell the story of the female body as the sight of experience, shared knowledge and resistance.   In this conversation, we just straight into discussing The Night Alphabet, and how she imagined drawing together the stories of different people at different times to tell a story of violence.

This week I talked to author and journalist Dominic Bradbury, whose writing over his career has focused on showcasing and exploring the world’s most inspiring architecture and design, with his recent writing particularly focusing on the Mid-Century Modern Style. We talk about his upcoming book – The Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Masterpieces , as well as his reading influences from his parents – who were both deeply bookish and who introduced him to the authors and designers from around East Anglia in the 1960s.   This is a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation about where the world of architecture and design stand now and what we can expect looking forward. It is also a fascinating look into the early reading life of someone who grew up surrounded by some of Britain’s most influential authors.

This week I talked to Bettina Farack who has spent the last few years telling the story of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin. The Higher Institute was a centre for learning and a really important cultural hub for the Jewish community in Berlin before it was looted by the Nazis during the holocaust, and its books confiscated and distributed. Remarkably, in the last few years thousands of those original books have been collected from around the world, with each one not only telling the story of its origins, but also tracing a fascinating line to the present of books lost travelling around the world to private collections, libraries and flea markets. This is a fascinating conversation with someone who is wholly engrossed in the lives of lost books.