BBC World Service

Posted on Dec 31, 2014 in Media | 0 comments

The BBC World Service invited me to be interviewed for a programme titled "Crunch Lit," which explored the rise in recent novels and plays dealing with the 2008 financial crash and post-2008 economic conditions. Journalist Audrey Tinline was interested in examining the way in which literary texts can negotiate complex financial abstractions and their effects on individuals and cultural imaginaries in a way that non-fictional and economics journalism might not be able to do.

I was interviewed alongside Cristina Alger author of The Darlings (2012), which draws on her experience as a former Goldman Sachs analyst to narrate the downfall of a hedge fund and its effects on a wealthy family during the 2009 financial crisis; Adam Haslett, whose 2010 novel Union Atlantic features a senior bank manager struggling to keep his company afloat (a novel which was completed the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008); Colin C. Murphy, writer of the 2013 play Guaranteed which examines the Irish Bank Guarantee and was adapted into the 2014, The Guarantee; and Donal Ryan, author of The Spinning Heart (2013) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and details the devastating effects of the economic downturn on a rural Irish community.

You can hear my interview towards the end of the programme, where I discuss the privileged access that the literary form of the novel offers to considering complex abstractions such as financial speculation, the material economy, and our relationship with money – from Robinson Crusoe's Puritan values and exemplary capitalist faith in homo economicus to George Eliot's fetishisation of money in Silas Marner.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAMME ON IPLAYER HERE.

Image by 401(K)2012 under a CC BY-SA license.