In this special episode Miles is join by Dr Leanne Bibby (Teeside University) and Dr Barbara Franchi (University of Durham) to celebrate the life, work and legacy of A.S. Byatt. Byatt was not only a significant novelist and biographer but also a close friend of Iris Murdoch - Byatt wrote the first significant work of criticism of Murdoch's work 'Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch'.

We discuss Byatt's novels, short fiction, criticism, film adaptations and much more.

Leanne Bibby is specialises in historical fiction and historiographic metafiction, and the relationship of literary writing to feminist and intellectual cultural histories. She has published research on history, austerity and mythopoeia in A. S. Byatt’s fiction, the impact of women’s literary writing on second-wave feminism, and the capacity of literary writing to archive historical evidence. Her monograph on Byatt is 'A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Fictions, Histories, Myths': https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7

Barbara Franchi's research focuses on contemporary women's writing and historical fiction, with a special focus on how echoes of Empire reverberate in them. In particular, she is currently working on two main strands of research: ecocriticism and cultural memory in A. S. Byatt and Sarah Moss, and the sea as a signifier of imperial memory in contemporary historical fiction by British and postcolonial writers. Recent publications pertaining to the first strand include an article for The Journal of the Short Story in English (2022) and a chapter in A. S. Byatt and the Wonder Tale (ed. Alexandra Cheira, Cambridge Scholars 2022), both exploring material feminism, environmental questions, and national memory in Byatt's short stories. You can find an article by Barbara on Byatt here: https://theconversation.com/how-a-s-byatts-northern-identity-and-anger-over-climate-change-informed-her-fiction-218400