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'The Garret podcast is a series of interviews with the best writers writing today, and this episode features English writer and academic Ian McGuire. Ian McGuire’s The North Water was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It also made The New York Times ‘10 best of 2016’, and for good reason. From the opening page it pulls the reader into a world of violent, toxic characters for whom no type of depravity is off limits. Largely set on a whaling ship in the mid nineteenth century, it’s clearly the work of a writer with extraordinary skill and a frightening mind. Ian also co-founded The Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Today he is our guest, and I started by asking him about his literary influences as a young man.' (Introduction)
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Transcript available from website.
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Show notes
'Ian cites a number of influences on his work, including Ernst Hemingway, George Orwell and John Cheever, as well as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Ian recognises Shakespeare’s King Lear and Colm Tóibín’s The Master as specific influences on in The North Water. Ian’s first publication was a short story in Chicago Review in the United States. When asked which authors he would recommended to aspiring novelists, Ian chose Alice Munroe (for her technical yet interesting style), Don DeLillo (for more experimental writing) and also John Cheever and Anton Chekov.'
