Claire Nicholls
speaker
2,363 appearances
20 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard 13 Sep
Claire Nicholls’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 — 19 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
The book is called Sophie Standing There.
And Sophie, she works at a writer's festival and she finds herself becoming completely and utterly fixated on one particular writer, a superstar author.
Meg, it's great to have you back on the book show.
We haven't said that yet, but let's get there.
So Sophie works at a literary festival.
I kept imagining Sydney Writers Festival when I was reading this book, but you don't say where it is.
Yeah, because her job essentially is to put the microphones on the writer and the moderator before they go on stage.
I love a story that takes place in the wings of any sort of performance space.
You do have a bit of fun with this, particularly in the opening chapters.
Sophie tells us about George Saunders being someone who famously complains about microphones distracting him.
I want to come back to our main character, Sophie.
So we've said she's got the job at the Literary Festival.
She's miking people up.
Her job is to be almost invisible to those authors because their eyes are on that glittering audience outside.
You said Sophie's gone through a personal crisis.
What is going on in Sophie's life in this period that we meet her?
Especially after Sorrow and Bliss, I guess, where there's so many feelings in that book.
So many feelings.
But, I mean, I did want to reflect on that for a moment because Sophie, traditionally, we find out, has been a big reader of so-called sad girl fiction, right?
She said she loved those books when she read them, but now in this particular moment, in this depression, they seem threatening to her.
Showing 141–160 of 2,363 · page 8 of 119
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