Where would we be without Charles Dickens? The biographer and academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and short story writer Helen Simpson join Alex Clark for a very festive edition of the Vintage Podcast.Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/vintagebooksSign up to our bookish newsletter to hear all about our new releases, see exclusive extracts and win prizes: po.st/vintagenewsletterRobert is an award-winning biographer and Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Story of Alice; before that he wrote Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist which won the Duff Cooper Prize. He is currently working on a new book called The Turning Point: Dickens’s World in 1851. The year of the Great Exhibition and the year in which Dickens began writing Bleak House, 1851 has been called the turning point of the century as well as of Dickens’s career. You can read more about his books here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/robert-douglas-fairhurst/1074442/Helen is the author of six short story collections including Four Bare Legs In a Bed, Constitutional and Hey Yeah Right Get A Life. In 2011 Helen wrote a short story for The Times called ‘The Chimes’ about a book club dissecting Dickens’s novel The Chimes, which he wrote as a follow up of sorts to A Christmas Carol. Later published in her collection Cockfosters, it draws uncomfortable parallels between Dickens’s world and our own – and has more than a little of Dickens’s playfulness about it too.Read more about her work here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/helen-simpson/1006023/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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