In this Winter series we've already welcomed Cynthia Zarin, Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard, Tim Conley and Samuel Rigg. We bring down the curtain with Cynthia Banham and her short story Swimming With Crocodiles.

Banham confesses that she shares her protagonist's passion for rewilding, but insists that her short story both is and isn't about the author: "You don't really control what finds its way into your story."

After losing her legs following a plane crash in 2007, Banham says that one of the few things that gave her some measure of control was writing. "My only way to avoid the grief overwhelming me was to retreat to my computer and my notebook and to write."

It took Banham seven years before she could start writing about the accident, and then another three before publishing her memoir, A Certain Light. She delves further back into her family history in Mother Shadow, due in April 2026, but says that fiction is a liberation.

"Writing memoir I've found to be really tricky morally, ethically," Banham explains. "There's a freedom in writing fiction."

But that freedom is not without risk, she adds. "This is a whole new level of danger, where you're in constant danger of offending. And I think about that quite a lot."

That's it for this Winter season. We'll be back in Spring.

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Although a short story that explores parenthood and loss is far from his own life, Rigg tells us his short fiction rarely starts close to home.

"Often I find I'm writing about people who are not me," he says, "or are relatively far from my own experience. You obviously need to find a way in that connects."

This connection with an issue that might seem remote can sometimes be fairly abstract, Rigg continues. "If the form comes to you with that subject, then you don't really question it, you just think, 'OK, I know what I'm going to do,' and you go with it."

At the Rink took the author all the way to Scarsdale, a suburb north of New York City where Rigg – like his protagonist – has spent some time.

"Maybe there was a sense in which I wanted to write a character who was an outsider," he says, "because that's how I came to that place myself."

The nuclear family and the picket fence may never have been a dream for every American, but it still holds some power.

"I'm not sure that the suburbs in Britain have the same significance," Rigg suggests, "or quite the same cultural resonance."

We'll be listening out for echoes with Cynthia Banham next time, as we dip our toes carefully into her short story Swimming With Crocodiles. 

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While Conley does confess to owning a few vinyls, he's fascinated by the idea that a record can also be "something that we regret". If you look at where the word comes from, he continues, "to record something is to have it by heart, again. That intrigues me, because there are things that we want to forget and things that we want to remember."

In Records, the author explains, "Anna's trying to forget and the ghost is trying to remember, or reclaim a past that he once had".

As a literature professor who writes on Joyce, Nabokov and Beckett, Conley admits that his own fiction can be a little highbrow, but insists that it's "not without a great deal of feeling".

"Thinking and feeling are not opposed to each other," he says. "As AI debates show us, people seem to think that thinking is somehow greater than feeling, and that's not true. They're both a very humane human activities."

Conley's fiction is also shot through with humour, but that's only part of the picture.

"It has to be fluid," he says. "Funny is part of a strategy, but it's not exactly a goal in itself."

This kind of variety is what draws Conley to short form fiction.

"The novel can be swallowed up a lot more by convention," he argues. "In some ways it's more compromised."

If the novel is "a little more tyrannical", Conley adds, the short story "is a lot more liberating in a weird, weird way. It also can linger."

We'll be hanging around with Samuel Rigg next time and his short story At the Rink.

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We began this Winter series of podcasts with Cynthia Zarin, who suggested that every single one of us is torn in different ways. We'll be examining those cracks with Tim Conley, Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg over the next few weeks, but this time we welcome Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.

According to Urquiola, his short story DYSNEYWORLD is all true. The author says that – just like his character – he grew up in a couple of small rooms on the edge of La Paz and sometimes stayed in the big house where his grandma worked, a childhood he says was like "living in two worlds".

The gap between one world and another was hard he continues, but he's "not complaining. When I was a child, that arduous path exhausted me too much. But everything I experienced, when it wasn't sad or painful, seemed fun, full of adventures and discoveries."

Other writers might have explored these memories in autobiography, but when Urquiola started writing about a football match it came out as fiction. He compares memory to a bolt of lightning, which suddenly "illuminates everything".

"The short story is the genre where this magical feeling can be achieved and left to linger in the mind," he says.

While there are always losses when you translate from Spanish to English, Brassard argues that it's worth the heartache to get a flavour of La Paz.

"Rodrigo's writing captures the rhythms, the poetry, the way that people talk," she says.

This reportage is central to Urquiola's project.

"A writer is simply an observer who reads," he explains. "Writing is a way of reading."

But there's still a lot of freedom in the way an author can make these observations.

"Any genre is useful to say the truth," Urquiola insists, "not just realism. When I read great sci-fi, for example Philip K Dick, he is telling me the truth. He's showing me the world in a way that's possible to see it and I don't think he's lying to me."

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Zarin reveals that both the houses in her short story are taken from life, but with a certain amount of embroidery.

"Everything is drawn from life," she says, "because what else is there?"

Her protagonist is torn between New York City and Cape Cod, her heart "in two places at once", the author continues, but that's hardly unusual. "Very few of us live lives that are not full of complication and conflict."

After five books of poetry and a glittering career as a journalist, Zarin says she fell into prose fiction almost by accident.

"I'd started writing, actually, a letter," she explains, "and then that letter just became something I wrote all the time. It started out as a letter to a specific person, but it became absolutely something else."

Zarin's novels Inverno and Estate are constructed in layers, with significant moments tolling through them like bells – a natural form for a writer who believes that "everything is about memory".

But it's a form that took some time to emerge. When she showed the work in progress to her friends they would say, "OK sweetheart, it's very beautiful, but what is it?"

Zarin says that she began to find out what her letter might be when the artist and writer Leanne Shapton told her to "Stop trying to put it together, take it apart." And she identifies a meeting with her agent, Luke Ingram, as another turning point.

"We started to talk about the structure," she recalls, "and we drew it on a napkin."

As a poet and journalist, Zarin says she finds prose fiction something of a liberation.

"The idea that you can have a character and you can decide that she has red hair – it's fun."

We'll be having more fun next time with Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.

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This enigmatic comic imagines a couple divided by distance but reaching for connection by talking about the weather. So when Ephameron joined us down the line from Antwerp, we began with an update on the skies.

Clouds are endlessly fascinating, the author says, "A lot of painters have been interested in painting skies and how you do the textures right."

In <cloud_update>, Ephameron uses watercolours, a technique she says she first adopted when she was travelling, pairing it with a font based on the video game Minecraft.

"I'm an artist," she explains, "so I try and draw inspiration from a lot of different corners of the web."

This broad vision, married with a background in fine arts and an ambition to tell "stories that are set in real life, that are talking about real issues", puts Ephameron's work firmly on the boundary between art and story.

"I really want to push the borders," she says.

That's all for this Autumn season.

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This story is set in the 16th century.

"We are not really sure what life was like then," Kasimma explains. "After colonisation, a lot of our culture was destroyed or merged with the beliefs of the colonisers, so that we don't really – in my opinion – have the original culture and beliefs that we had then, before European intrusion."

Some of the most important differences in Igboland – the homeland of the Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria – were around women's rights, she continues. "Everybody was equal. Both male and female owned land, both male and female could do the same kind of jobs. There was no 'A man is better than a woman,' or 'A male child is preferred.' All these things are just debris of colonisation."

Many of the details of life five hundred years ago are lost, so there was a lot of freedom in trying to capture that world view.

"It's mostly just fiction," she says.

Our ancestors may have been more connected with the natural and spiritual worlds, Kasimma continues, so there is a lot to learn from them. "But we shouldn't go back. I don't want to go back. I like my phone, and I like my laptop. I like the airplanes, I like the nice hotels. I love how far we've gone, as human beings, to make life easier for ourselves and to bring communication closer."

Next time we'll be communicating with Ephameron, discussing the weather and her graphic short story <cloud_update>. 

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Clark tells us she isn't really sure where this haunting story started.

"I could tell you a story about how this story came together," she says, "but it probably wouldn't be the real one."

The author explains how she assembles her writing mosaic fashion, instead of a "linear, chronological manner".

"I think that's what I have to do," she says, "to get my words out there – come upon something from a different angle."

This mysterious process may have served her in poetry, memoir and now fiction, but she isn't hung up about genre, suggesting that her work is "all connected".

"When I've written everything you'll have the video game of Caroline Clark," the author adds, "and you can play it."

We'll be levelling up with Kasimma next time as we discuss history, equality and her short story Mama Taught Me That. You can find her here on the site or via Apple podcasts, Spotify, Acast and Podchaser and more. 

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Habila tells us how, after twenty years of living in the USA, in this story he's trying to "make sense of America".

"History is not past," Habila says, "it's still with us, and we're living the consequences of that history of slavery in America. To even begin to understand the place, you have to grapple with that history."

Paradise puts different Black experiences alongside each other – a Nigerian girl living in Northern Virginia, a young woman whose mother is Nigerian and whose father is white, and a vision of the Brazilian countryside "filled with Black people". But at the heart of the story are two twins, whose ancestors were enslaved on the Strout Estate.

When they return to the house, there's "almost a beautiful symmetry", Habila says, "a cycle coming to a close".

"You can only imagine that, for them, what it must feel like." To be free people, he continues, knowing their ancestors could never have dreamed of the freedoms that they enjoy today, "that's the contradiction, that's the complexity in American history and the American present, where the past is always in conflict with the present".

Some people want to erase the evidence, Habila adds, to "rewrite history. They want to claim that the slaves were actually happier being slaves than Black people are today."

The pressure on academics, the new boldness of people in power to say out loud what could only be said before in a whisper is "scary" he says, but he has to go on. "The only thing one can do as an artist is just to remind people and historicise these things and try to turn it into art."

Next time, Caroline Clark will be talking about the inevitable pain of the writing life and her short story I Will Go.

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We bring this season to a close with Sheyla Smanioto and the haunting threat of her short story Intruder, translated by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis.

Speaking with the help of the interpreter Jaciara Topley Lira, Smanioto tells us that the story came to her with "almost the last sentence", in a dream where "Somebody was holding me by the throat and saying, 'Look how difficult it will be for me not to kill you when I'm choking you'."

She had to deliver that sentence so that she could recreate the feeling she had in the dream, she continues, "And so that's why I needed to trick the reader sometimes."

The slippery first-person plural, the sudden switches between the present and the past and the abrupt swerves into dialogue that keep the reader on their toes are also a challenge for the writer.

"So, in a way," Smanioto adds, "both me and the reader are victims of what the text needed."

Pito's bar is midway along the great journey from the country to the city that Smanioto charts in her novel Out of Earth.

"It's a historical movement," the author says. "It's a movement that brought my family to São Paulo. But when you look at it as a movement, it always looks like it is made up of a mass. But it's never a mass, it's made up of people."

The people who make this journey are left with a "specific type of loneliness", Smanioto continues, an emptiness that she has tried to fill with her writing by "creating a culture that was a sort of dream, a memory of the past".

Even though she calls herself a "very intellectual" writer, dreams are still central to her work.

"I have studied technique," Smanioto says, "I'm a literature graduate. But I can't create anything if I don't feel it in my skin first."

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McKimm tells us how The Nosebleed was a story that came to him with the ending already in place, citing the translator Michael Hofmann and his notion of Kafka time, where it's "already too late".

With this type of story, the author says, "You just set the ball rolling and the characters fruitlessly struggle against the inevitability of that ending."

Even though McKimm tries to keep politics out of his stories, it's a notion that feels very 21st century.

"We do certainly seem to be living in a world where, if it wasn't too late ten years ago, it certainly is too late now," he says. "We might be fighting a losing battle."

While the sharp divisions in the bookshop between fantasy and surreal fiction are something of a mirage, McKimm continues, there is still a difference of approach.

"Even though you might write a secondary-world fantasy, where the world is very different to the world we live in," he explains, "it's going to have dragons or whatever, or magic exists, the tone of the world is very similar. Whereas in a surrealist story, or an absurdist story, it's the feverishness of the tone that is turned up. You turn up the dial on your paranoia, on your madness essentially, your internal madness."

Next time we'll be turning up the dial with Sheyla Smanioto and her short story Intruder.

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McClary confesses that the intense friendship between Min and Hazel is drawn from her own experience.

"I hope that all girls, all women have these kinds of friendships," she says, "that feel a little bit magic, a little bit disgusting."

They may not always end well, McClary continues, "but for those brief moments or those long, hot summers, they're really beautiful, and they're the most important thing in people's lives".

The trauma buried at the core of Proper Magic emerged out of the writing process. And it was only when looking back at the story and starting to edit that the author says she realised "how dark and how heavy the secret at the heart of the story is".

"When grief hits," McClary explains, "or there's a big cataclysmic event in someone's life, I think it's fairly common that people slip out of reality a little bit. Everything becomes slightly unreal, they see everything with an entirely different lens because the world as they have known it for so long has been completely shattered."

We'll be looking beyond the real with Dafydd McKimm next time, and his short story The Nosebleed.

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Segall tells us that this series of snapshots emerged after he took up analogue photography. He was wandering around the neighbourhood taking pictures of "the same buildings, the same places" and he began to ask himself "if there are posts in some kind of Facebook group about 'Is there this weird guy taking pictures of your house?'"

As his fictional neighbourhood and its inhabitants came into focus, it became clear the story was about "looking and looking back and being looked at," he continues, a feeling that is "very modern".

"There's a very ambient feeling of being watched," Segall says, "of being perceived."

Bolex Man is a story assembled out of fragments – an accommodating form for someone who "writes in very small bursts" – and it's up to the reader to fill in the spaces between each frame.

"I don't feel like it's my job as a writer to answer questions," Segall explains. "I feel like it's my job to ask, 'What is going on?' To delineate the experience of not knowing what is going on."

After years in which Segall tried to write "conventional fiction" with plot and character, he's embraced his natural rhythm.

"If that means that a story ends up being four words long," he says, "then a story is four words long. And I am in love with that."

Next time we'll be falling for female friendship with Ali McClary and her short story Proper Magic.

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Kennedy says that the story emerged out of the "very strange day" earlier this year which saw the commemoration of Martin Luther King and the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Upstate New York was covered in snow and ice, she explains and "it seemed good to put people in that weirdness of first snow, because it always looks like a clean start".

The author was sitting at home "not watching the inauguration… the most not-watched inauguration in history", and thinking about wealth.

"It is a time when the wealthy are just inconceivably wealthy," she says, "and other people are always dodging complete destitution."

In Expedition Skills, Martin wants to wander across boundaries like kids, who can "go wherever they like". But the limits on our freedoms are never quite as solid as they might look, Kennedy argues, "because a lot of policing and democracy and power is about consent. And if you don't consent, the people in charge, they're always a massively smaller number."

If people want to keep politics out of fiction, "you'd have to keep people out," she continues.

"Writing well, trying to create characters that people can enter into and practise empathy, and reverse the psychological pressure that is online, that's a political act. I'm sorry, it just is. That's why people like Erdoğan and Trump and Bolsonaro and all the variety of dictators who are floating about, that's why they'll arrest you. That's why they'll suppress your work. That's why they like burning books."

Kennedy's latest novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, features a set of major characters who are all damaged in one way or another, but "that's life", says the author. "Very hard to not have trauma. I don't even know if it's entirely healthy to not have any obstacles."

And it's either great pain or great joy that delivers the extraordinary emotional spike that fiction requires. Writing about the positive side may be "very difficult", Kennedy adds, but only focusing on the bad things in life would be "psychopathic. It's just, buckle up and try to make the good stuff interesting."

Next time, we'll be looking for the good stuff with Pete Segall and his short story Bolex Man.

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Clarke tells us that it's a story she's been thinking about for some time.

"I have never really stopped thinking about Strange and Norrell," she says. "It's a world that keeps summoning me back."

In the novel, The Raven King was very young when he first arrived in England, Clarke explains, "and I had an idea that he wasn't too happy. And also that he would be surrounded by politicians."

Even though The King of the North is not a fairy himself, she continues, "his fairy upbringing has had a massive influence on him, and he's never really quite at home with human beings. He ends up in this middle space, not quite one thing and not quite another. And that's kind of useful to him, but it's also quite lonely."

Clarke remembers learning at school that the Norman conquest was a wonderful thing, but it was actually a massive upheaval.

"Nobody quite realised that of course it's being conquered by the French," she says. "And that, particularly for the north, was an absolutely traumatic thing."

Just as in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke found that exploring the differences between her human characters "made a little space to put the fairies in".

"In a fantastical story, you've got to play with things being very fantastical and alien, and also try to make them slightly humdrum, so that they become believable."

The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is full of Clarkean weather, the "thick mist" around Durham, the rain falling across the New Castle on the Tyne in "grey, slanting lines", and the author confesses she feels at home in the rain.

"If you look at Strange and Norrell," she says, "most of it is set in winter. I think, grudgingly, there are a few chapters set in summer."

The rain and wind even seep inside the house in Piranesi, another novel poised like its author between Classicism and the Romantics.

"I like the formality of 19th-century prose," she says, "but I always want to push it out of a 19th-century shape and do something different with it."

Clarke found she was pushed to do something different herself, when her long struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome made her put aside the sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and focus on "things that felt feasible". But she hasn't left it behind.

"I'm still moving towards it," she says, "and I do hope to have the energy and just the brains to write it. It's far from abandoned. It's absolutely what I want to do with my life."

Fatigue and brain fog may make it harder to write, Clarke admits, but they don't bring the creative process to a halt.

"Stories and fiction don't really come from that place," she declares, "at least they don't in me. They come from my imagination, from my unconscious, and those things aren't ill. They're fine."

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We've already welcomed Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett and PR Woods in this Spring series, and Susanna Clarke will be joining us next time. But now we're hearing from Jeremy Wikeley with his short story Kent's Oak.

According to Wikeley, his main character's disconnected connection with his neighbours on the estate is just how it felt when he was growing up in the suburbs of a small town.

"You were very familiar with a lot of places and a lot of things," he says, "and you were at home. But you didn't have many opportunities to express that with other people and therefore were you really at home?"

As someone who has "always felt very English and sort of not English," Wikeley explains, Englishness is "a big hobbyhorse of mine – what it is, how it feels".

There's an element of disconnection buried in the heart of Englishness, he continues. "Nature writing, which is tied up with Englishness, is often a response to the destruction of the countryside and the destruction of nature. And so the time element of it is always loaded with loss, but also with nostalgia."

But for Wikeley these losses are an inevitable part of being human.

"I don't have a problem with cutting down trees," he says, "which is maybe not what you were expecting from this story… as long as you're doing it for a reason."

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We've already heard from Fríða Ísberg and Bronia Flett in this Spring series, and we'll be welcoming Susanna Clarke and Jeremy Wikeley on to the Fictionable podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're going back in time with PR Woods and her short story Our Lady of Sorrows.

Woods tells us how Sister Avis came to her after someone wrote to the Guardian about Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall arguing "It's a great story, but it didn't happen like that."

In the 16th century, the dissolution of the monasteries was a great upheaval, Woods says, so she asked herself "how did it actually happen? You've got this massive, fundamental change in the landscape of England, the literal landscape – houses and buildings being demolished – but also the religious landscape. I was just interested in the logistics of of it."

"An awful lot of the monks and the friars could become what we would essentially think of as parish priests now," she continues. "But that obviously wasn't an option for the women. So where did they all go?"

While Woods confesses a fascination with the Tudors, she's no fan of Henry VIII.

"He was a tyrant," she says, "he was dreadful to women, to all his wives in one way and another."

But Woods imagines that Sister Avis would have seen this awful king for what he was.

"I like to think that she tutted whenever she heard rumours about what Henry VIII was doing, that she was disappointed by him again and again."

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Flett tells us how her short story Leopard, Spots fell into her lap, and explains why she wanted to put female friendship under the lens.

"We do form these close bonds," she says, "and more often than not they're our defining relationships in our lives."

Women who are very close to each other may tell each other a lot, Flett continues, but "it might not necessarily be positive conversation all the time. And we are still keeping things from each other, and we are still inventing ourselves in the presence of other people."

This constant negotiation of the self with others begins at a very early age, she argues, confessing that the argument between two children in Leopard, Spots was plucked from life.

"We're always telling other people who we think they are and should be," Flett says, "and insisting on who we are and being told, 'No, you're not'."

Maybe some of us are predisposed to "brooding on these issues", she admits, but – for the writer – "looking back for those moments where you think 'Oh, why did I behave like that? Who was that person who behaved like that?' That's where you start to get these universal truths."

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Like much of her work, Ísberg explains, Fingers began with the cadence of a character's thought.

"You don't need to know what the mother's name is," she says, "or the job description, or where they live. You don't need to know that at the beginning, you just really need the rhythm of that person. It's like knitting a sweater. You just need to know what kind of pattern you are doing and then you can just do the whole thing."

The narrator in Fingers is woven from the anxious expectations that surround relationships in the 21st century.

"It's really hard to meet the standards that we have towards the love match these days," Ísberg says.

In western societies, women are shaking off the constraints imposed on them and refusing to "sacrifice their standards".

"Power is shifting, absolutely," Ísberg says, noting that "The Icelandic word for marriage is brúðkaup, which is 'bridal buy'."

The glass may be half full for gender equality in Iceland – a country currently governed by a coalition led entirely by women – but violence against women is still a reality Ísberg can't ignore.

"I have three close friends who have had their former boyfriends just completely lose it," she says, "breaking into their apartments or staying outside their house or their car. It's really threatening and they don't see it as a threat, because they see it as a romantic gesture."

In a world where people are increasingly demanding simple narratives from their political leaders, fiction can help us navigate the messy complications of real life.

"For me," Ísberg says, "it's always more trying to understand the two different views."

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Kavenna tells us how this story was born from an obsession with patterns and a robust detachment from her characters.

"I like to have quite questing narrators," she says, "who are desperately trying to find meaning in a world that keeps depriving them of meaning. Which is probably quite autobiographical."

When you’re writing, Kavenna continues, you’re constantly forced up against the gap between language and the world. But it’s a question that none of us can avoid.

"All of us are in this," she explains, "whether we like to be or not. And it’s this strange illogic logic that we’re all existing within."

While the characters in Kavenna’s novel A Field Guide to Reality are in pursuit of a book that will answer all their questions, Notes on the Future begins when a book which promises to reveal the future is found. But according to Kavenna the future is "a massive area of complete, unknowable fiction" for us all.

"There’s something quite powerful about the predictions of the future that we all make," she says, "because we’re more likely – potentially – to unravel things towards them."

Even if we could conjure a world in which we know everything, it’s not clear that we would want to take that path.

"Would we want to know the full remit of the future," Kavenna asks, "or would that be actually the most horrifying nightmare of all?"

The AI-driven future imagined in the author’s novel Zed takes her characters dangerously close to that precipice.

"I felt really sorry for them," she admits, "because I put them in this dystopia, which seemed really unfair after spending so long with them."

Five years after Zed hit the shelves, that future is coming down the track with alarming speed.

"If you’re going to be compelled to live in a certain reality," Kavenna says, "it would be nice to be asked. And I think that’s the major political question that we now have."

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Lamrabet recalls how this story was set in motion by a chance encounter with an old friend, which brought back memories of pedal-powered escapades while she was a teenager.

"Everyone had a bike," she remembers. "If you didn't have a bike you'd steal a bike…"

Her character decides to leave her childhood behind, a choice that always comes "with a cost", Lamrabet says.

"We're living in a society, especially in western Europe, where apparently it isn't possible to have a compromise between different worlds, different backgrounds. Very often we are led to believe that you cannot have both, you have to make a choice."

The unequal society in which we live is marked by divisions of class and race which could only be addressed through radical change, she continues. "Those who want to maintain the status quo, they are not in favour of that movement."

There are signs that Belgium is beginning to confront its colonial past, but according to Lamrabet "we still have difficulty facing what we did".

"This country cannot continue to hide itself," she says. "It must confront that history."

Perhaps fiction, which is powered by empathy, can play a part.

"It will not change the world overnight," Lamrabet admits, "but I think it's important to take that platform, to introduce these different stories and to tell your perspective."

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So far we've heard from Helga Schubert and Ben Sorgiovanni in this Winter season. We'll be welcoming Joanna Kavenna and Rachida Lamrabet over the next couple of weeks, but for this feature we present Julian George and The Movie Lovers.

George tells us how this short story emerged from the classic 1950s sitcom, The Honeymooners.

"I just thought of the character played by Audrey Meadows, Alice," he says. "Sometimes that character wanted something else, or there were moments of unexpected poignancy."

The cinema on East 14th Street where his two movie lovers meet was a "real picture palace", George continues. "I don't know if Charlie Chaplin or Al Jolson or Jimmy Cagney ever went there, but I like to think they did."

There may be plenty of gaps in the history of the Imperial for the writer of fiction to explore, but George was determined to find room to experiment in his novella Bebe, a fantasia on the life of Richard Nixon's friend, confidant and fixer Bebe Rebozo.

"I could have written this rather straightforward book," he explains, but "I have to keep myself entertained. I like to have a laugh."

Writing may be fun, but as a poet George is keenly aware of the need to measure out his prose, beat by beat.

"I want it to sing," he says, "but the song might be a darker one."

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He tells us how this story grew out of a philosophical thought experiment about how you would know there was a tiger in a forest if you'd never seen it, and why his characters were looking for a tiger, not a mouse.

"I think it's quite symbolically rich, this idea of a tiger," Sorgiovanni says. "I don't know exactly what it symbolises in the story, but I like the idea of the tiger there, in the national park somewhere, but out of view."

He reveals that – as it happens – he went to India and didn't see a tiger. But the line between his own experience and the experiences of his characters is something he still wants to explore.

"There are a whole bunch of interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between a philosophical article – which advances an argument – and a short story – which has a conclusion, but doesn't necessarily have an argument in the same sense."

Perhaps a subject for further study.

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Banks turns interpreter as Schubert explains how this story was awakened by an appearance on a panel discussing one of German literature's most prestigious awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize.

"The joke is," Schubert says, "the only reason I was even selected as a jury member was because I hadn't been allowed to take part when I was invited as an author in back in 1980."

It's a story that had to bide its time, Schubert continues. "I had to wait until my mother died, because I didn't want to subject her to the truth about this whole thing."

The stories in On Getting Up are all true, she insists, "They're all fragments, like ruins, or rubble I've come across in my life."

These pieces are then assembled in an almost mathematical construction to make a coherent whole.

"Everything has to add up precisely," Schubert explains, "nothing is coincidental… It's really as if I were building something, a house for example. It's as if I'm sewing a patchwork quilt."

Her training as a psychotherapist has helped the author distance herself from her own work – a vital skill for a writer, Schubert maintains. "Without this distance you wouldn’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel."

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Mngodo tells us how this story ate another of her short stories, Without Sun.

"It came from the idea of how things are within other things," she says, "how everything is interconnected."

In First Date, the links stretch across an entire millennium. Mngodo feels that we still have much in common with each other, even across vast distances of time and space.

"The human experience, whether you're in Tanzania, or you're in London, or in America, it's still the same," she explains. "We still feel fear, we still have hope. We still want to love and be loved."

Our experiences may be the same, but there are still tensions in the ways we reflect them in language, even when it is our mother tongue.

"We tend to believe that Swahili is this very beautiful language that is locked with the great writers like Shaaban Roberts," Mngodo says. "The rest of us are just aspiring to get there. And so for most of my life I felt that I wasn't good enough in the Swahili that I spoke or wrote."

It was when she first went to the US and Canada to study that she began to embrace writing in Swahili, a decision that affected her on the deepest levels.

"It was during that time that I realised I started dreaming in Swahili," she recalls.

With a language like Swahili, these complications are rooted in the complexities of a contested history.

"For people who like to argue," Rubin says, "you can argue that Swahili is detrimental to local indigenous languages. They're being wiped out because Swahili is used as a national and regional language. Now you could also say the same thing about what English is doing to Swahili."

But it's also very possible for languages "to enrich one another", he continues. "There's not like a net sum, where when more English comes in Swahili gets pushed out, or vice versa."

For Mngodo the question of what language to write in goes beyond "who owns the language".

"The language belongs to me," she insists, "if I can express through it.

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While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists that her story is definitely not autobiographical.

"I have been on one of those holidays," she says, "but it didn't end up like that. There was much less cruelty."

Under the surface, she explains, Titanic is driven by technology.

"Teenagers have been struggling with their mental health for a long, long time. But I suppose phones do bring this new aspect into it of never being able to turn off. And the internet is this vast space where there's endless things you could be looking at. Sometimes it's very difficult to know when to stop looking."

In our connected world, you're never far from the extremes, Webb continues, extremes that are often rewarded by the algorithm. But that unreality doesn't make the experience any less important.

"The emotions that you feel from it are happening in the same body," she says, "and you're going to have the same mind. It's good to retain perspective, but at the same time it can be dismissed too easily as not real."

The world always feels like it's breaking, she adds, but Webb hasn't given up hope. "While there's maybe a lot of uncertainty, part of that uncertainty is also possibility."

We'll be exploring possible futures with Esther Karin Mngodo next time.

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According to Jacobs, this curious tale was a "real-life experience".

"I changed the names, to protect the innocent," he says, "including the name of the restaurant."

But the last-minute invitation, the bottle of Primitivo, the bowler hat and that curious note were all drawn from life.

The story gave Jacobs a chance to examine the sharp divisions of social class in New York City during the 1990s, and to offer a glimpse into the rarefied world of Manhattan's Upper East Side.

"You really had a sense of the dichotomy in society," he explains, "the haves, the have-nots."

After time as a marketing executive and as a lawyer, writing is Jacobs' third career. And it's one that combines the skills he learned in marketing with the linguistic precision he honed in the legal profession – that and his own "creative juices".

We'll be talking with Hannah Webb next time.

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This graphic short started when she began thinking about her own family, and how the funny story her grandfather Jef told about his bike trip to France in 1940 was actually "part of big historical events".

"I never thought of my grandparents in a political way," Vanistendael says. "But they were involved, without even wanting to be."

The writer explains how she didn't know much about the history that lies under her story, with millions of people on the move as the Germans advanced and hundreds of thousands of young Belgian men sent to the south of France to train. And beyond these bare facts, she admits it's difficult to tell whether the story Jef told was really true: "My grandfather was a good storyteller."

The second world war still looms large in Belgium, Vanistendael continues, because it was so tough.

"We're a small country, we're quite new," she explains. "We were made in the 1830s by everybody around us. We do not trust power, or big stories."

One of the large stories that runs through Vanistendael's work is the experience of refugees. Her first graphic novel, Dance by the Light of the Moon, is an autobiographical story about her first relationship.

"I was in love with a Togolese, Muslim refugee," she says, "and it seems as if this first love has defined my storytelling."

Human beings have always been restless, she continues, but the arbitrary boundaries of the nation state have changed everything. "Being on the move in this world, the way it is organised, is very difficult."

Over recent years, Vanistendael has started using digital techniques alongside more traditional ways of making images and she doesn't rule out the possibility that comic artists will be replaced by AI. But she's confident that artists will always find ways to use their skills.

"I don't know the future," she says, "but I'm not that afraid."

Next time we'll be looking ahead with Scott Jacobs.

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Conference appears in Johnson's forthcoming collection, The Hotel, and she explains that throughout the collection she set out to write about "what it means to live in unsafe spaces".

"We feel like we should be safe at work and protected," she says, "and increasingly it's becoming clear that we're not."

Johnson may never have worked in an office, but the dangers that beset the narrator of Conference are all too familiar.

"I have worked in places where there does seem to be an awkward dynamic."

The conflict in Gaza has made it all too clear how "our safety is really fractured", she continues. "We're all vulnerable, and the people who are supposed to look after us – the police, local authorities, our government – they don't have our best interests at heart."

The narrator first glimpses the "half-things" who whisper through doorways and gather around the coffee cups in the mirror-filled lifts of her shiny offices – a reflection that mirrors the doubling of the two young girls at the heart of Johnson's latest novel, Sisters.

The author admits she's "always trying to write about the double".

"The line of interest for me in horror is somewhere between it being something within us and it being something without in the world," Johnson says. "And I think for me it's most exciting as a reader when we're uncertain of those lines."

Families are always a little uncanny, she adds. "There's something so strange about knowing people for that long and the power those relationships have and the hold they have on us."

Johnson is also writing more and more about the climate crisis and our relationship with the land.

"Often the land is answering back," she says.

We may be faced with global heating, populism and misinformation, but Johnson says she isn't giving up hope in writing. "There is a kind of truth in fiction."

Next time we'll be examining the truths of fiction with Judith Vanistendael.

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Darraj tells us that she started with an image, an old man in his kitchen "looking at this bizarre package of frozen food". That and the thought of him sitting there "surrounded by his children and almost none of them actually can sympathise with him" was enough to set her on her way.

May You Wake Up to a Homeland is the first piece of fiction Darraj has been able to write since the Israeli invasion began last year.

"The first six months I think I was just in shock," she says, "and I couldn't believe it was still going on. But now it's been ten months."

After ten months, she explains, it's time for it to "seep into the creative work".

"Everything is hard," she continues, but "witnessing what's happening is the least we can do."

Every writer from a marginalised community feels the burden to represent that community, Darraj says, but she's not so sure it's a burden any more.

"I'm just trying to portray the experiences of Palestinians in a way that's authentic, because the media seems unable to get it right."

And while fiction isn't journalism, it can do something "really remarkable", she adds. "It asks you to pretend you are living someone else's life for a little while. And you do it. You all obey the author, don't you?"

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Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea. "It sort of spun out from there," he says.

While Wales is no monolith, Klausner explains, in South Wales mining still looms large. But over the last thirty years its meaning has changed.

"Now it seems it's almost like a ghost that hangs over families, or hangs over towns," he says.

Coal once represented "hope and potential", Klausner continues, driving industry forward to progress and prosperity. But as the climate crisis accelerates the black stuff has taken on a more menacing shade.

"It might end up being in someone's fireplace, keeping them warm," he says. "But you've got to get it there, and it's a dark and dangerous journey to that point."

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We start with questions of vocabulary, as Bruck clears up exactly what a china is and fills us in on the cultural significance of the gaucho.

The author says she was writing against Esteban Echeverría's poem The Captive, inverting the traditional Argentine dichotomy between civilisation and barbarity.

"Civilisation has always been associated with everything that comes from Europe," she says, "and la barbarie – this savageness – has always been associated with the indigenous, with what was original to America."

In China, Bruck upends Echeverría's scheme. "Civilisation is associated with Constanza the Mapuche woman," Bruck explains, "who rebels against the savagery of Eugenia and her family, who aspire to be as European as possible."

The myth that Argentina is a European nation is still a powerful force – all the more so after Javier Milei's victory in last year's elections. Life for Argentine writers is "bad, in a word", Bruck admits. "Those who work in the culture industry are suffering, the government is attacking them."

But fiction can still make a difference. "The impact it has is neither direct nor mechanical," Bruck says, "but it represents hope."

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Cash tells us how the cabaret artist who takes a leading role came to his rescue a few years back and has been "wandering around" ever since.

He recalls work as a journalist reporting on the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity specialising in young LGBTQ+ homelessness, which "fed into this story".

"I'm interested in how some queer people can feel that distance from their family," Cash explains. "And then having to come back and reconnect with her brother was something I found fictively intriguing."

As someone who grew up in the southwest, he understands the claustrophobia of small-town life and how some queer people "dream of leaving and going to the big city… But, of course, you never leave your past."

Cash made his name as a spoken word poet and playwright, a training which he says stood him in good stead when writing for the page.

"What writing for performance really gave me is the understanding of what keeps an audience's attention," he says.

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If you haven't read it already, you might want to head over there before you hit play, because Harvey got straight to the nub of things as soon as we started talking.

She told us how she got started on a story that looks death square in the face. Sitting beside someone in their last days, "You know that you should be feeling something splendidly profound," Harvey says, "but you can't quite find what it is."

Time grinds to a halt, with normal life suspended – just as it is for the astronauts in her latest novel, Orbital. Set across a fractured day on the International Space Station, Harvey says she relished the challenge of translating that "extremely rich visual world to the world of black marks on a white page", but struggled to feel "it was all right for me to write it in this age of great veracity".

"I wonder why this would be interesting to anybody," she asked herself, "that some woman in Wiltshire has made up some stuff about being in space."

In the end she decided to give herself permission, Harvey adds, "and it just has to be good enough".

"This is what fiction can do," she says. "I believe in fiction."

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Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Lights, a semi-autobiographical novel which the author turned into a hit show for HBO. But Many Years of Hardships draws on deeper roots.

"One of my first memories from childhood is my grandmother telling me stories about little dwarfs," Żulczyk explains. His hero, Big Barrel, is one of the characters from the Polish imaginary, a krasnoludek only two inches tall.

A lot of Żulczyk's writing comes from "dark places", he continues, but in Many Years of Hardships he gives his twisted sense of humour free rein. "At the heart of it all, it’s a funny story."

But there's a serious side to Big Barrel's struggles with food, doggos and a shadowy figure pulling all the strings. Surrounded by war, powerful corporations and the climate crisis, the dwarf's predicament feels all too familiar. "We live in a world now where everyone feels like this," Żulczyk says.

The challenges we face may be acute, but the author remains an optimist.

"Totalitarian structures, or power structures, or violent structures ultimately fail in confrontation with powers that are open-minded, that have freedom of thought, open channels of communication and so on."

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This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister?

Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?"

"I've always really liked the witch's response, because she's so perfunctory about it," she says. "She just goes 'I've been killing swine, obviously, I'm a witch'."

Thinking about female power and powerful children, Rahtz transported Shakespeare's blasted heath to a farm park and turned his witch into a toddler. There's something mighty about a small child, she explains, "It's that tug between huge power of emotion and complete impotence within the world."

Channelling her eldest daughter, who was a "force of nature" when she was young, Rahtz sets her uncanny toddler loose – though she insists that no animals were harmed in the making of this story.

Witches are outlaw figures who disrupt the patriarchy, Rahtz continues, and writing is a kind of disruption to her job as an English teacher. While the GCSE English language paper is a "horrorshow" where children are being asked to dance a grammatical jig, "the joy of being an English teacher is you teach around the edges of the curriculum".

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Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a predominantly secular culture.

Our culture is very individualistic, Smith says, so if you're following Christ, "you’re not following the culture… to be so fully part of it is kind of rebellious."

We're being persuaded all the time, she continues, in politics, fashion or wider society – "primarily to buy things". But when churches put the focus on converting young people at large-scale events, religious persuasion can tip over into manipulation.

"They make you kind of vulnerable," Smith says. "There's all this music playing, there's people praying for you, there's people telling you how you should feel… That can become spiritual abuse."

She's still not sure where she is in her journey of faith, but Smith says that books can often play a similar role: "For me it's often the same thing."

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Like the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, an inspirational figure in Making It Happen, Williams says he's not much of a planner: "If there's a spark, then let's just start writing and see where it goes."

He didn't set out to tell the story of the Troubles, but – as in his own childhood – they loom over Quinton McCandless's life as an "ever-present threat".

"Stuff was going on, heinous things happening," Williams says, "that constant reminder that we live in quite a difficult and strange place."

Growing up, he didn't have "a very sophisticated understanding of the Troubles", Williams adds, and there was always an expectation that he would leave.

"My story was, I left Northern Ireland and the narrative was fulfilled," he says. "But what happens if you don't leave, if you have to stay?"

Living with a young family in England, Williams says he really feels "that distance from home… There's an ache, there's a pain that comes from having left."

Despite this sense of loss and the many troubles that beset Quinton in Making It Happen, Williams says he maintains a sunny outlook on life: "I'm definitely an optimist."

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When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck began by reading from the opening of the story in German as well as in Michael Hofmann's supple translation. Sloughing Off One Skin is set in motion by a piece of paper – a false passport – and Erpenbeck admits she's always been "suspicious of documents".

"Paper is not just paper," she says, adding that it's "a surface, and under the surface things can happen. They are shifting, they are moving. The surface stays unmoved."

Erpenbeck explains how Sloughing Off One Skin ends with a spooky coincidence drawn from life – "in a way this is a ghost story" – and confesses she struggled with the ending for her novel of the refugee crisis, Go, Went, Gone.

"I couldn’t see any kind of end to the story," she says, "and so I thought I’ll write down a solution that obviously is no solution, so that readers can understand there is something left to do."

Borders loom over Erpenbeck's latest novel Kairos as well, which charts the dissolution of the border between East and West Germany in 1989. The author recalls the strange dislocations of changing countries while remaining in one place. "Outside became inside, or our outside wasn’t there any more."

Erpenbeck adds that she has a "strong connection" with questions of memory and "how times are interwoven with each other".

"I wanted to become an archaeologist when I was young," she says, "so I’m still digging."

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Hogan tells us how it all came from his suspicion of heroes. "They often have it far too easy," he explains. "If you have someone with supreme skills then… what's the challenge?"

There's a dark thread running through his collection of short stories, Happy Ending Not Guaranteed, but Hogan says "there has to be an element of humour".

Literary fiction may have a problem with comedy, but Hogan is unabashed: "It's the puncturing of pomposity, which is just fun."

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Neuwirth tells us how his story started from a couple of one-liners that were driving him crazy and wound up stuffed full of computer code.

We anthropomorphise the machines that surround us, he says, so we keep expecting "artificial intelligences to be human. But they're not. They're inhuman."

While he tries to keep his fiction separate from his career as a journalist, where he's been reporting on informal economies and shanty towns for more than twenty years, there's obviously some "bleed through".

"The world is a non-narrative place," he explains. "There are stories we can tell and those stories have a kind of narrative, but there are always fractures in the narrative and places where your complacent narrative blows up."

Next time we'll be talking heroes and villains with Liam Hogan.

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Marken Jack tells us how their writing began in isolation, flat on their back with chronic fatigue syndrome. This debilitating illness is giving rise to writing they call "the most 21st-century form of literature that I can imagine… Who among us doesn't have that feeling that almost everything in life is completely outside of our control?"

They reflect on the second guessing common to all those marginalised by the patriarchy: "This thing happened. This was bad. Was it really that bad?" And they pay tribute to the value of connecting with those who have had similar experiences.

They also wax lyrical about the alchemy of making bread and the joys of making pickles – a "vote of confidence in the future".

"It takes about three weeks to make a good jar of sauerkraut," Marken Jack explains. "So you're slicing the cabbage and you’re going, 'I'm going to be here in three weeks. And this cabbage is going to be amazing'."

Over the next three weeks at Fictionable we’ll be hearing from Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan.

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Smyth explains how his story isn’t exactly set in Budapest and reflects on how the bleakness of the steppe echoes the stereotypical grimness of the north of England.

Writing in the third person can feel "restrictive", he continues, because he wants "to see inside", while the first person is "just more fun".

"Talking in a new voice is such an absolute delight," he says. "I think it’s one of the reasons why I write."

That and perhaps love – a subject Smyth says he returns to "again and again". Not that he has a rose-tinted vision of humanity, he adds. "My basic position is: people are all right."

Next time we’ll be talking baking with Ariel Marken Jack.

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Mannheim explains how the central character in her story Those Last Days appeared to her "out of the blue" and how she found her fiction inexorably drawn back to her childhood in Washington Heights.

Things were a little different back then to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical – there was certainly less singing and dancing – but what is writing for, she asks, if not to explore the difficult subjects that are part of life?

Growing up in "a refugee neighbourhood", the sense that there are places you can never go back to was "really, really big", Mannheim adds. "The only way I could go back there was by writing about it."

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Bolt tells us how she fell in love with mushrooms despite, or perhaps because of, their double nature. These mysterious organisms were the perfect lens through which to explore the expectations surrounding young women at the beginning of the 19th century, she explains, an issue that still has resonance in the 21st. With historical fiction, "you can step into another land", she continues, but it's always connected to the present day.

Fairy-Land hovers at the edges of Bloom. Bolt reveals how she had to resist its pull and how she found the model for her sparring sisters closer to home.

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Mackay tells us how her short stories are driven by voice, by characters she conjures up and then follows on the page: "I sound like a witch now." The characters come from mixing and banging words together, she explains, so she enjoys spending time with them, even if they're sometimes a little awkward.

According to Mackay, the northern texture of these voices emerges from the rhythms and tones of her everyday life, but it's hard to say exactly where they come from. Perhaps she's drawing on the time she spent working as a nurse, she continues, where you "see humanity in all its messy glory".

Next week we'll be joined by Catriona Bolt, who'll be talking mushrooms and reading from her short story Bloom.

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Birnie tells us how he was fuelled by frustration at work and struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It made me laugh, I think," he says, "but I wasn't sure it would make anyone else laugh."

Elements of the gruesome office mechanics in The Medical Room are drawn from life, Birnie explains, but the pull of horror fiction lays bare the power structures that are always at play.

Next time we welcome Shauna Mackay, with Catriona Bolt joining us the following week.

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Karpa explains why the language from the streets that she used in her early novels came as such a shock to Ukrainian literary culture, and how her pride in her country is "like being proud that you have kidneys or heart or lungs – you're just born like this". Her fiction and her music are part of the same artistic project, she adds, even though sometimes her fans don't even know she does both.

Looking back to 2014, Karpa remembers playing to crowds of thousands in Maidan square. She explores what life is like as the war grinds on, and looks forward to a day when Ukrainians can build a new society.

Next time we'll be focusing on Seán Padraic Birnie, with Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt joining us over the weeks to come. In the meantime, you can read Kate Tsurkan's report on how Ukrainian writers have been responding to Russian aggression since 2014.

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Harrison tells us how he constructs his stories from fragments of real life, filed in notebooks and then reassembled into uncanny structures on the page. At one stage, this process was "consciously not very fictiony" he says, but by the time you’ve spent ten years exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, "it's stopped being conscious any more, and it's just a thing that you do".

Fiction should be "read like nonfiction", he continues. "It's not there for you to put on like clothes and re-enact."

The past looms large over both I Can't Tell and his recent anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, but according to Harrison writing has always been a struggle with things that have gone before. That and his "very, very unrelatable" characters, who are uniformly tricky to get on with – tricky, that is, apart from the cats.

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We bring this series to a close with Sabba Khan, who joins us to talk about At the Door. She tells us how she started working on this graphic short story at a difficult time in her own life, and how the move from memoir into fiction gave her a sense of freedom. She reveals her obsession with London's Victorian terraced housing and a fascination with the spirit realm of black magic, djinns and demons. Khan also examines the barriers that divide comics from writing in prose, and reflects on the mystery of her mother tongue.

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McLaughlin has been writing short stories about his main character, Liam O'Donnell, for thirty years. Both author and protagonist grew up in the heart of a large, Catholic family and moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in the 1970s. And McLaughlin admits that runaway was sparked by a childhood memory of running away from home. But he denies his story is autobiographical, citing the title of Janice Galloway's 2008 memoir, This Is Not About Me.

He explains how adopting Liam's narrow perspective allows him to widen the story's reach, and how the voice he hears in his head needs more than standard spellings to sing on the page. Going back to Derry as a teenager, McLaughlin says he would marvel at the humour, colour and warmth of the conversations around him. And it's that energy he captures in his prose.

Next time we welcome Sabba Khan to talk about her story, At the Door.

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He tells us why he wanted to look at the violence of a flash kidnapping from the inside in his short story Flash of Dignity, and what drives his characters to attack a woman at gunpoint and throw her in the boot of her own car. According to Falero, capitalism is to blame: "Guarantee that people have access to consumption and they won’t rob from anyone."

Even though he wrote the story in a Porto Alegre dialect, he continues, it has struck a chord with people all over Brazil because people all over Brazil are struggling with the same problems. And how do you fix the outrageous inequalities which are at the heart of all this? Falero’s answer is simple: diversity.

Next time we'll joined by Donal McLaughlin with Sabba Khan following after.

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She tells us how this trip up the mountain began on a family holiday and explores how characters suffering from mental illness pose a particular challenge for writers of fiction. As the kind of author who has always tried to put herself in other people's shoes, Mozley says she's convinced writers can tell stories that are not their own – provided they do the work.

Next time we'll be hearing from José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, with Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan joining us over the coming weeks.

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We're devoting an entire programme to Joyce Carol Oates and her fantastic story Small Veins, with Fiona Mozley, José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan all joining us over the coming weeks.

In this programme, Oates tells us how she paid for Small Veins with her own blood, and how she works out if something is a "Story" or a "Tale of Suspense". She talks typography as she explains how she captures the rhythm of thought on the page, and examines the very Oatesian notion that "the unimaginable improbable will become, within a surprisingly short period of time, the imagined probable".

"In my heart I'm sort of like a fourteen-year-old girl," Oates confesses, and perhaps this focus on the new and the wonderful is the secret of the unquenchable creativity this eighty-five-year-old master of fiction in all its forms still shows in all her work.

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Lucy Caldwell tells us how she built her story Katherine Mansfield's Cat by weaving the New Zealander’s words with her own, and how the mystical connection she feels with the pioneering Modernist makes the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Michael Donkor says he didn't set out to épater les bourgeois with his strikingly intimate story of a three-way relationship, Invitation, while Adaora Raji reflects on how the Biafran war she returns to in her story The Proper Way to Cook Oha still feels like a "continuous present tense" more than fifty years later. And Serena Katt explains how her graphic story Submerged rose up from something that happened to her – an experience that is all the more shocking because it is so everyday.

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Carlos Rojas turns simultaneous interpreter as we hear from Yan Lianke, and get a taste of all the other stories in our Winter edition – stories from Ali Smith, Ross Raisin and Lizzy Stewart, who tries to work out the going rate when it comes to pictures and thousands of words.

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We also welcome Amy Sackville, Yasmine Seale, Arinze Ifeakandu and Julian Hanshaw, who introduce all the stories in this Autumn issue – that is, when they can remember what they've written. And we also hear from our advisory panel: the composer Iain Chambers steps off the bench to provide the surging soundtrack to Fictionable’s audio output.

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We hear about all the stories in Summer 2022, with short readings from Hall, Alain Mabanckou, Ladee Hubbard, Owen Booth and Isabel Greenberg. And we also hear a little about how the magazine was funded, with a great, big Fictionable thank you to all our Kickstarter backers.

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