Will Dean

Hello and welcome to The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National, on the ABC Listen app and anywhere at all as your weekly book-filled podcast.

I'm Kate Evans and Cassie McCullough.

It's terrific to, well, to not see you again.

Oh, fantastic.

Well, today's reading, let's start with that one.

So today we're going to have writers and books and readers, of course, including the crime writer Will Dean and a trio of Australian writers, Belinda Castle, Deborah Adelaide and Nicholas Jost.

But we're going to begin by talking about RN's annual book festival.

Well, I'm going to be speaking to him tonight.

That's Friday night.

And I'm really looking forward to talking to him about things like accents and poverty and the extraordinary figure of his mother, Agnes, which is at the heart of that novel.

A woman who's an alcoholic in Glasgow,

And just the way that he puts both the pain and tenderness and humour of her life on the page, I'm really looking forward to talking to him about that.

But Michaela, can I confess that there's one conversation, well, there's a couple of conversations I'm really looking forward to.

And one of them is with the mythographer Marina Warner, who wrote The Beast to the Blonde.

Utopia Avenue.

I mean, in a way, the interesting thing about him is that all of his books, and they're often quite big, Black Swan Green, so many others, they all connect to each other in really interesting ways.

But just the latest one that's all about music.

Well, I'll be speaking to Sebastian Fowkes, who wrote Birdsong, but also has written so many other novels, especially about war in the beginning of the century.

So I'll be talking to him.

But I've also got a panel of crime writers, one from Ireland, one from England, one from Australia, all together.