Lit with Charles

My guest today is someone I’m lucky enough to have known personally for many years, so getting the chance to interview him today was a real treat. Aastish Taseer is a writer and thinker who straddles many cultures – Indian, American, British – and this cultural journey infuses his writing with refined and penetrative insights. I first met him in India, when I was living in Delhi and he took me under his wing and introduced me around & gave me some great tips on how to navigate this massive city.

In the past, I’ve really appreciated his work and always recommended it, such as his novel “The Way Things Were”, a multi-generational Indian family saga, and his non-fiction work, like “The Twice Born” where he wrote about contemporary challenges to the ancient ways of the Brahmin caste in the holy city of Varanasi in India. When I heard that he had a new book out called “A Return to Self”, where his travels to sacred and remote sites around the world would be viewed through his own complex sense of identity, I could not wait any longer and immediately called him to get an interview.   In our chat today, we dig into some questions surrounding belonging, identity, exploration and exile. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Aatish Taseer’s four books were:

• Survivors in Mexico, Rebecca West (2011)

• In Light of India, Octavio Paz (1995)

• A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)

• My Friends, Hisham Matar (2024)

To kick off the new season, I’m joined by the brilliant Lee Cole, whose writing captures the heart, complexity, and contradictions of contemporary America. Raised in rural western Kentucky, Lee’s fiction explores themes of identity, class, and belonging with a rare mix of tenderness and clarity. In this episode, we talk about the power of literature to reveal lives and landscapes we might never otherwise encounter, and why writing about home can be both fraught and freeing.

If you love stories that dig deep into the cultural and emotional terrain of modern life, you won’t want to miss this conversation.

As always, Lit with Charles loves reviews — if you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving one and help spread the word. You can also follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles for more literary takes and behind-the-scenes extras.

Lee’s book picks from the episode:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver (1981)
A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor (1953)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America – Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
The End of Vandalism – Tom Drury (1994)

Time to close another season of the Lit with Charles podcast! During this second season, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to some truly amazing authors about the books that have influenced them, the books they’ve written, and how they approach their work. For this episode, I've gone through the archive of interviews to shine a spotlight on a few of my favourite moments. It's an eclectic mix of authors sharing their thoughts on a varied list of subjects and books, and I hope you enjoy it!

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Gertrude Stein is a name that inspires equal amounts of both awe and fear in prospective readers. An absolute icon in her time, she was an unparalleled tastemaker: collecting work from Picasso and Matisse when they were unknown local painters; mentoring Hemingway and Fitzgerald as bright-eyed, unpublished hopefuls; and hosting ‘talk of the town’ salons at her Parisian abode. However, when it comes to her writing, things have always been a bit more complicated.

To help me unpack the life, legacy, and ‘afterlife’ of this fascinating figure, today I have the pleasure of speaking with biographer, author and journalist Francesca Wade. Her new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, is set to hit shelves in the upcoming month. It was a great chat, and I hope you enjoy it.

In this episode, I’m joined by Irish writer Sarah Maria Griffin to talk about the four books that have most shaped her creative journey – from early influences to enduring literary obsessions. It’s a fantastic conversation, ending with her newest work, Eat The Ones You Love, a bold and visceral work of feminist horror. In the episode we talk about writing as transformation, the power and joy of horror, and what it means to create with teeth.

Sarah Maria Griffin’s four books were:

• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (1986)

• Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy (1990)

• Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (2015)

• House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Today’s episode looks a lot like the last one. Again, I wanted to dive deeper into one of our Book Club selections and in March, we read “Dream Count” by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this episode, we look at her biography, at this specific novel, and how it fits into her wider work. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow me on Instagram (@litwithcharles) to keep the literary conversations going. Let’s get more people listening - and reading!

Today’s episode looks a little different – rather than interviewing a guest about their work, I’m getting to grips with our last Lit With Charles book club pick. We read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room last month as a community, and I, along with many of you, absolutely loved it.

So, I’m using this space to reflect on that experience, share my thoughts and feelings about the book, and take a moment to dive deep into Baldwin’s life and bibliography. I’d love to hear from you what you think about this new format, as something that could potentially slot in alongside our regularly scheduled content. Personally, I really enjoyed recording it, and I hope you get as much out of it as I have!

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow me on Instagram (@litwithcharles) to keep the literary conversations going. Let’s get more people listening—and reading!

Today, I’ve got an absolute treat for you: I sat down with Oluwaseun Olayiwola—poet, choreographer, and all-around creative powerhouse—to talk about his latest collection of poems, Strange Beach.

Oluwaseun is one of those rare artists who moves seamlessly between the page and the stage. As a choreographer, his work has graced performance spaces from London to Paris, and as a poet, he’s got a voice that feels like it’s bending language in real time.

His collection Strange Beach grapples with Blackness, queerness, intimacy, migration—all through a lens that feels at once deeply personal and intellectually expansive. It’s like standing at the shore of something vast, something shifting, something you can’t quite pin down but can absolutely feel.

In our conversation, we get into the themes of the book, the connections between dance and poetry, and what it means to make art that moves—literally and figuratively.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow me on Instagram (@litwithcharles) to keep the literary conversations going. Let’s get more people listening—and reading!

In this episode of Lit with Charles, I sit down with Benjamin Markovits to discuss his latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives. This beautifully reflective book follows Tom, a middle-aged father who, after dropping his youngest daughter at college, keeps driving, embarking on an unplanned journey that forces him to confront the unresolved trauma of an affair, a failing marriage, and a mysterious health condition. Blending the themes of a road trip novel, midlife crisis, and personal reckoning, Markovits crafts a story that is much more than the sum of its parts—meditative, intimate, and profoundly moving.

Markovits, a British-American novelist and former professional basketball player, has a long and acclaimed bibliography, including You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016. In this conversation, we explore his own transatlantic upbringing, how his writing is influenced by his experiences, and why midlife transitions make for such compelling literary themes. The Rest of Our Lives is set for release in the UK in late March, and I wholeheartedly recommend adding it to your reading list.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow me on Instagram (@litwithcharles) to keep the literary conversations going. Let’s get more people listening—and reading!

The improbable destinies of two Soviet female spies, connected by a modernist building in North London, is an intriguing premise for any spy novel, let alone one that introduces elements of architectural design in its story. But when those destinies reflect a larger literary opus and sources of inspiration, as they do for today’s guest, then the conversation expands significantly. My guest today is Maryam Diener, an Iranian-born author, publisher and poet, whose work has been translated into French, German and English. Her picks are absolutely stellar, and I’m happy to admit that I’ve actually gone out and bought a couple of them to add to my shelves since this interview took place.

Our conversation today took place in person, in Maryam’s West-London home, which was a real treat. It’s always so enriching to speak with people in their ‘natural habitat’, as it were. Today’s chat was a very special one for me – stay tuned to find out why.

Maryam Diener’s four books were:

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!