Books Up Close: The Podcast

In today's episode I walk to Oluwaseun Olayiwola about his poem 'Strange Beach' (the first one) from the book of the same name.

Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Telegraph, the TLS and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He’s been commissioned by RSL, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Southwark Council, and Studio 3 Arts. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. His debut collection was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US). Since publication, Strange Beach has won an Eric Gregory Award and was Poetry Book Society Winter 2025 Special Commendation. Seun is an inaugural member of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadlers Wells East. He is a lecturer in dance in the Kingston School of Art and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Episode notes: 

• Jorie Graham, 'Le Manteau De Pascal'
• Negative Capability (Keats)
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill
• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
• Victoria Adukwei Bulley, 'The Ultra-Black Fish'
• Louise Glück
• Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
• Maggie Nelson, Bluets 
• Adam Phillips, The Life You Want 

Book recs:

• Claudia Rankine, Triage
• Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
• Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
• Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies 

Follow the show on Instagramand subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here. Follow Seun on Instagram.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In today's episode I talk to Kai Spellmeier about his new novel Boy Friends (Bloomsbury 2026).

Kai Spellmeier is a German author currently living in England. He has published several books in Germany, including YA novels and non-fiction, and he has been blogging about books on Instagram for many years. Boy Friends is his English language debut.

Book Recs:

• Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You
• Cameron Sullivan, The Red Winter
• Douglas Stewart, John of John 

Follow the show on Instagramand subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here. Get more from Kai at his Instagram. 

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode I talk to Madeleine Dunnigan about her novel Jean (2026) from Daunt.

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship in Paris. Her first novel, Jean, was published by Daunt Books (UK) and W.W. Norton (US) in 2026 and will be translated into Spanish, German and Italian.

Episode Notes:

• Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven (listen to my ep with him); Philippe Besson, Lie With Me; Justin Torres, We the Animals

Book Recs:

• John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun
• Louise Kennedy, Trespasses
• Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
• Susanna Moore, In the Cut
• Virginia Woolf, The Years
• Octavia Butler's short stories and manifesto
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
• Yoko Ogawa, Hotel Iris

Follow the show on Instagramand subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here. Get more from Madeleine on Instagram and at her website madeleinedunnigan.com. 

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode I talk to Fatima Bhutto about her book The Hour of the Wolf (2026) from Daunt Books.

Fatima Bhutto is the author of the novels The Runaways and the Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, and the non-fiction New Kings of the World and Songs of Blood and Sword, which deals with her father’s murder and the Bhutto family’s history in Pakistani politics. Bhutto’s journalism and essays have appeared in the New Statesman, New York Times and Guardian, and elsewhere.

Episode Notes:

• Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House; Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion; Jill Ciment, Half a Life and Consent; Melissa Febos, 'In Defense of Navel Gazing'; Julie Myerson, The Lost Child.

Book Recs:

• Tareq Baconi, Fire in Every Direction and Hamas Contained
• Helen Garner, This House of Grief
• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
• Hiba Abu Nada, 'I Grant You Refuge'

Follow the show on Instagramand subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here. Follow Fatima on Instagram too.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode I talk to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst about his nonfiction book Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading (2025).

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst was born in 1968 and lives in Oxford, where he is a Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His most recent books are Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading (2025) and Metamorphosis: a Life in Pieces (2023). Previous books include The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World (2021) The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (2015) and Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (2011). His other publications include Victorian Afterlives (2002), and editions of A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, London Labour and the London Poor, The Water-Babies, and The Collected Peter Pan for Oxford World’s Classics, and A Tale of Two Cities for Norton. He is a regular reviewer and features writer for publications including the Times, Spectator, and Literary Review. He has worked as a historical consultant on BBC adaptations of Jane Eyre (2006), Emma (2009), and Great Expectations (2011), the 20-part BBC1/Red Planet series Dickensian (2015-16) and the Netflix feature films Enola Holmes (2019) and Enola Holmes 2 (2022). In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode I talk to Seth Insua about his novel Human, Animal (2025)

Seth Insua is an Anglo-Spanish writer and artist. He was born in Kent in 1989. He graduated from the University of Oxford with a First in English Language and Literature. His debut novel, Human, Animal, was published by VERVE Books in 2025 and Letras de Plata in Spanish the following year. It was selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club with Sara Cox, and shortlisted for both the inaugural New Adult Book Prize and the Book of the Year: Discover by the British Book Awards. He lives with his husband, David, between Newcastle upon Tyne and Madrid.

Episode notes:

• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading...'
• Roland Barthes, S/Z (the proairetic code)

Book recs:

• Saleem Haddad, Floodlines (go back and listen to my interview with Saleem!)
• Josh Silver, Fruit Fly

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Find Seth at sethinsua.com or @sethinsua on Instagram. Please leave feedback here.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode, I talk to Torrey Peters about her story 'Stag Dance' from the collection of the same name.  

Torrey Peters’ first novel, Detransition, Baby won the PEN/ Hemingway Award 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book. A Times Top Ten bestseller, it was longlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her follow-up Stag Dance is a quartet of short stories that explore trans life past, present and future.

Episode notes:

• William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
• Strunck and White, The Elements of Style

Book recs:

• Halldor Laxness, Independent People (trans. J. A. Thompson)
• Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling (trans. Anne McLean)
• João Guimarães Rosa, Vastlands: The Crossing (Alison Entreckin)

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Find Sasha on IG @sashajdm. Please leave feedback here.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode, I talk to Sasha Debevec-McKenney about her poem 'WHAT AM I AFRAID OF?' from her collection Joy is My Middle Name.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the author of the poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo, 2025). She received her MFA from New York University, was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in places like The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Drift, and Granta. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University.

Episode notes

• Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets

Book recs:

• Yasmin Zaher, The Coin
• Steven Duong, At the End of the World There is a Pond
• Elisa Gonzales, Grand Tour

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Find Sasha on IG @sashajdm. Please leave feedback here.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode, I talk to Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant about their edited book Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (2025).

Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University and Johanna Winant is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College.

Episode notes

• William Carlos Williams, 'The Red Wheelbarrow'
• Winant, 'The Claims of Close Reading'
• 'No Crisis', LARB
• 'Close Reading is a Conversation', The American Vandal 
• Morten Høi Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain

Book recs: 

• Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, The Leopard
• Solvej Balle, On The Calculation of Volume, Vol III
• Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal
• Mark Haber, Lesser Ruins
• Mircea Cartarescu, Solenoid

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Find Johanna on BlueSky and Dan on BlueSky or Instagram. Please leave feedback here.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

In this episode, I talk to Sara Ahmed about her book No is Not a Lonely Utterance: the Art and Activism of Complaining (2025).

Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her most recent book is No is Not a Lonely Utterance: the Art and Activism of Complaining, which was published by Allen Lane in September 2025, and which follows on from The Feminist Killjoy Handbook also published by Allen Lane in 2023. Previous books include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019),  Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (201$), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations Objects, Others all published by Duke University Press. She blogs at feministkilljoys.com and has a newsletter https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/.

Sara's book recs: 

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, The Cancer Journals, The Black Unicorn, A Burst of Light

Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Follow Sara on Bluesky (@saranahmed) or Instagram (@feministkilljoyatwork). Please leave feedback here. 

Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.