Backlisted

A Backlisted Special dedicated to biographies and memoirs, with books by Nancy Mitford, Roger Lewis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, P.D. James and Jean Rhys.   John Mitchinson talks to the writer and friend o...

11 Feb 20251h 13min

Classic literary sci-fi novel set in a post-apocalyptic Kent – this is a rerun of 2019 episode recorded live at the Port Eliot Festival.  Riddley Walker is widely considered to be a post-war masterpi...

4 Feb 202558min

The 1864 novella that invented dystopian fiction. In an episode first published in November 2021, we are joined by authors Alex Christofi (Dostoevsky in Love) and Arifa Akbar (Consumed: A Sister's Sto...

21 Jan 20251h 16min

Happy new year! We kick off 2025 - and Backlisted's tenth anniversary year - with our traditional Winter Reading episode, in which Andy, John and Nicky recommend a selection of favourite books to see ...

7 Jan 20251h 7min

Join the Backlisted crew as we navigate the swells and surges of Moby-Dick; or the Whale by Herman Melville. That's right, Moby Dick is a Christmas book! Andy, John and Nicky welcome aboard novelist J...

25 Dec 20241h 14min

We are joined by the poet Katrina Porteous and the writer and editor Patrick Galbraith to discuss Norman Lewis’s account of the of the three summers he spent working in Farol, a remote fishing village...

10 Dec 20241h 7min

Rupert Everett joins us to discuss David Niven's memoir The Moon’s a Balloon. This show represents the fulfilment of a long cherished ambition: to dedicate a whole Backlisted to a book that Andy and J...

26 Nov 20241h 13min

Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, returns to Backlisted to discuss two novels by Nicholas Fisk, Grinny (1973) and its sequel, You Remember Me! (1984). Fisk's SF th...

13 Nov 20241h 10min