Beejay Silcox
speaker
505 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 2d ago
Beejay Silcox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you, Kate?
I'm well, thank you.
Now, look, we've got a new collection of short stories in front of us from Australian writer Inga Simpson called Once We Were Wildlife.
But before we get to that, let's talk about nature writing and ecofiction, climate fiction.
I mean, what term do you like to use, Tony?
Yeah, I mean, writers, including Margaret Atwood and Lauren Groff, they've argued that all writing now is climate fiction or somehow engaged with climate anxiety.
I mean, do you think they're right in making that big claim?
Well, and I'm interested that you use the word place there, Tony, because when you talked about what you did in White Girl and in other things that you've written, I mean, that sense of place is so strong.
And with writers like Melissa Lukashenko, Tara June Winch,
That sense of place and an engagement with, well, I always think birds because of the brolgas in Tara June Winch's work or the talking crows in Too Much Lip by Melissa Lukashenko.
It's an engagement with place and a deep history of the place without having to use labels, which, as you say, can be in danger of being didactic, which is something that storytellers always have to be quite wary of, don't they?
Yeah, and that's something that I think even Ian McEwan has done in his latest novel, What We Can Know, which is set in a flooded future Britain.
And so on the one hand, you've got a dystopian landscape and on the other, it's a novel that deeply engages with the past and archives and poetry and a sort of looking back.
And I'm sort of interested in how often people engage
can write what you might think of as climate fiction by writing a dystopia as well, because there's a lot of pretty interesting examples of that around at the moment as well.
Well, look, you know what, Tony?
I know we are heading towards Inga Simpson's collection of short stories, but I wondered if we could just pause for a minute and I can tell you about another book that I've just read, partly because it does the dystopian thing and there's a focus on a child, which I think you might find quite interesting.
It's by an Australian writer called Sarah Walker, who's written a collection of essays called The First Time I Thought I Was Dying.
Showing 241–260 of 505 · page 13 of 26
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