Lit with Charles
Welcome to Lit With Charles, a podcast on all things literary! I'm Charles Pignal, and every fortnight I’m asking guests about the four books which have made the biggest impact on their lives and work. If you're like me, you love literature – but maybe aren't always sure what you should be reading. The aim of this podcast is to make literature exciting and accessible; in each episode writers, artists, and other interesting people are giving real recommendations, to help you discover new books and authors off the beaten track. Here at Lit With Charles, every book has a story to tell.
Show episodes
My guest today is artist and writer Gethan Dick, an Irish-born author, living in Marseille, who has written a very interesting book about survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Specifically, how pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing interface with a desperate quest for humanity’s continuation. In the episode, we talk
In this episode, I sit down with celebrated South African novelist and playwright Damon Galgut, a literary voice I’ve admired for years. Damon Galgut is the acclaimed author of The Promise, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, and has been shortlisted for the prestigious literary award three times over the course of his wr
Sometimes you meet a person who seems to have done it all – and today’s guest is definitely one of those guys. Ed Park is an American writer, journalist and general man of letters, born in New York, of Korean extraction. And, along with writing truly remarkable fiction, over the last few decades, he’s been involved wit
It was an incredible honour to interview an author I have been following for a long time, and itching to get on the show. Sue Prideaux is an acclaimed Anglo‑Norwegian biographer and novelist. Her works include I Am Dynamite!, a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche I read and reviewed last year, and more recently Wild Thing
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 i
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 tal
