7/31/2018 Marilene Phipps & Gail Honeyman

Write On Radio

Ian talks with Marilene Phipps about her memoir Unseen Worlds: Adventures at the Crossroads of Vodou Spirits and Latter-day Saint. In this powerful memoir, we enter the lives of a family who are both descendants of European aristocrats and African slaves. We meet Phipps's godfather, the rebel leader Guslé Villedrouin, and we relive her experiences with Vodou priests and spirits, a cold-eyed pope, a charismatic Muslim astrologer, Catholic monks and exorcists, American Mormon bishops, scholars and missionaries. Her collection, The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her poetry won the 1993 Grolier poetry prize, and her collection, Crossroads and Unholy Water won the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize.

Steve talks with Gail Honeyman about her debut novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. It has received massive praise from many outlets, including the NY Times, NPR, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and was selected by Reese Witherspoon for her book club and for the film rights. Honeyman studied French language and literature at Glasgow University. While working as an administrator, Honeyman enrolled in a Faber Academy writing course where she submitted the first three chapters of what would become Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine to a competition for unpublished fiction by female writers run by Cambridge’s Lucy Cavendish College.