John Lanchester

speaker

548 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 27 Jun

John Lanchester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · John Lanchester & Hattie Crisell: Look What You Made Me Do · 27 Jun 2026 podcast

But it is balanced by that thing.

I don't know I'm going to be able to finish it until I've got to the end.

I never do.

It's more like a nagging, anxious thing about, will I be able to finish?

I don't know I'm going to get to the end until I've got to the end.

Then by finish, I mean the end of the first draft, because then I know I've got enough.

I've got black on white.

There's something there.

We'll be able to get back and get it done.

And I've never been able to shake off that feeling that maybe this time I won't be able to get to the end.

It's not a dark night of the soul.

It's more like a bucket with a hole in it of anxiety.

You're not quite sure what you've got until you've finished.

Yeah, for sure.

And I can tell, the reason I can tell is that I can write nonfiction about, the indispensable condition is that I'm interested in it.

So the thing that's interesting I can write about is I'm doing a thing about money laundering now, just because it's a really interesting subject.

And the thing about novels is that I don't necessarily find it interesting, it's just I can't quite shake the idea off.

And it's like a sort of nagging person or it's like someone sort of plucking your sleeve and it just keeps coming back, doing that over time.

And ideas come and go, I find, fairly easily.

But like that idea that I described to you while I was brushing my teeth, I wrote it down on a notepad by the side of the bed and then sort of ignored it for months.

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