Lara Pawson

speaker

266 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 10 Aug

Lara Pawson’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

How could I write such an awful cliche of themes of kind of art and architecture and beauty, kind of Philip Larkin's fucked up.

My God, your parents fuck you up.

Poor Layla, she's so fucked up.

Fucked up families.

progress and nostalgia, faith and religion and atheism.

death, memories and our relationships with the past, but also economics, class, North-South divide.

I mean, really you kind of capture everything.

For me, I think the theme that really caught my, got me going was the kind of ideas of the purpose in life and pointlessness in life and Raf's violence, the violence he wants to commit.

and the death drive.

And I felt certainly, I guess, as someone who's written Spent Light, which is a lot about violence, I just really connected with it.

And I felt this whole thing of like violence is in all of these characters.

There's little moments where different people seem to kind of think very violently.

And also the way that you talk about this war on the northern town is kind of like a bomb going off.

So it's a big, big book.

I mean, it's 240 pages, but I feel like it could have been 500.

I certainly could have read 500.

I just really enjoyed it.

But I just wanted to begin by asking you, if you don't mind, like, how did you kind of come to the idea to write this book as it is?

Did it come to you in short bits or was it part of your...

and your journalism as you're going out looking at housing and building and the North-South divide and stuff like that.

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