Kate Evans
speaker
26,301 appearances
191 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2018
last heard 4d ago
Kate Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
in history as a sort of ghostly presence.
And I thought, well, hang on, why do we have to pretend history is full of ghost stories?
But then I sort of came around to it as an idea of the imagination of this
narrator and I think it happens, well, I say I think it happens, for me it happened on page 88, Bernadette, when suddenly this woman who she had described whose hand had been ruined in an accident and suddenly there's blood dripping into the water and the sheets that she's washing, suddenly she finds this character who's sort of wanting to stay and talk to her and who she feels as a presence and
And so then I thought, oh, well, actually, the idea of a ghost story isn't such a bad one.
This idea of haunting rather than ghosts also resists the obvious gothic overtones of what we think happened in asylums.
Definitely.
Which isn't to say that there aren't distressing things in here, because there are, but she also shows...
the care and attention of workers, doctors, psychiatrists, rather than it just being a litany of horrors, which is often what the whole idea of an asylum and particularly of a historical asylum does.
So BJ, as you're hearing us talk about this book, I mean, I know you've already convinced because this writer is something else, but immersing yourself into this ruined landscape and as Bernadette says,
It is all so powerfully done.
This is Diren Nagrifa's Said the Dead, published by Faber.
And I love the fact that on this program, on the bookshelf, we bring together disparate novels and the number of times there are connections between them is astonishing.
So just remember that there is a woman studying medicine at the very turn of the 20th century.
We'll come back to that, dear reader, as we will to the question of poets.
You're listening to ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, on air, on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcast.
And if you listen somewhere where you can rate us, please do that because it helps other listeners, other readers find us.
I'm Kate Evans with guests critic BJ Silcox and literary scholar Bernadette Brennan.
And now to another poet who has turned to prose.
The Australian Chloe Wilson has two collections of poetry, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, and one of short stories, Hold Your Fire.
Showing 3341–3360 of 26,301 · page 168 of 1316
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