Fictionable

About Fictionable

Interviews, book chat and everything about the short stories and graphic fiction from all around the world appearing in Fictionable. "Storytellers, readers and creatives alike will love" – The Independent Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Fictionable

Category

arts · arts · fiction

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

27 Jun 2022

Latest episode

27 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

68 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Aug 2026

   Elaine Vilar Madruga: 'I’m always thinking about Kafka when I write'

   This Summer series we've already heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu, Robin Munby and Zhenya Oliinyk. But we bring it to a close with Elaine Vilar Madruga and her short story Wild, translated from Spanish by Samantha Luna. Wild is not only a story about vengeance, Vilar Madruga says, it's also "a story about hope". "It's about sisterhood and it's about resilience," she continues. "It's about the possibility of survivors telling their own stories. Having their own agenda, Having our own words." Women have always spoken about male violence, Vilar Madruga explains, but it's always been behind closed doors. "Now we don't have any whisper of fear," she says, "we have a screaming voice. And that screaming voice allows us to share with the world what we are thinking and what our great-grandmothers and our grandmothers thought in their own lives." Vilar Madruga cites the Cuban saying "pueblo pequeño, infierno grande" – a small town is a large hell. Even though her stories are fantastical, unmoored in time and place, she's still exploring the shared experience of "the woman in the street". "My reality, my space, my spiritual biography, the territories where I live are not only mine," she says. "It's a human experience. It's not a Caribbean experience, or a Cuban experience or a Latin American experience, it's a human experience." The themes that run through Wild – male violence, motherhood, sisterhood – echo through her latest novel, La piel hembra (The Female Skin). And Vilar Madruga also returns to the idea of metamorphosis, with Kafka's story of a man who becomes an insect always at the back of her mind. "I'm always thinking in all my novels how men and women – the fictional characters – become monsters." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

2. 

   22 Aug 2026

   Zhenya Oliinyk: 'Drawing and writing comics is more like journalism to me'

   We've heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu and Robin Munby already in this Summer series of podcasts, and Elaine Vilar Madruga is lined up next. But this week we welcome Zhenya Oliinyk and her graphic short story A Night in Kyiv. This story is short and made up of unsettling images, but Oliinyk tells us it's "not exactly fiction". "It is a documentation of one particular night," she says, "in terms of the numbers, because the numbers are real." Oliinyk charts the night in a series of alerts as the ballistic missiles come down, the hits are confirmed and the death toll rises. And through it all runs the struggle to get some sleep. "This is pretty much how it is happening," the author explains. "It happens on a regular basis now, in Kyiv and in other big cities as well." Making art under Russian bombardment may be something of a challenge, but Oliinyk is resolutely practical. "It is my occupation," she says. "It is what brings food to the table. So I would be insincere if I'd say that it's just my way of copying with the situation, it's just how my artistic spirit needs to manifest itself. But no, it's just what I do for a living." Of course it's still meaningful and inspiring to share her work, she continues, but the brute realities of life remain. "Surprisingly, when the war starts you still have to pay rent and buy food. This is probably one of the biggest disappointments of the full-scale invasion." With the news full of long-range strikes on oil refineries deep in Russian territory, it's tempting to imagine the war is at some sort of turning point. Retaking Crimea may feel like a distant dream, but "it still feels empowering to know that we're not helpless," Oliinyk says, "that we're not weak, that we can actually make some impact." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

3. 

   15 Aug 2026

   Robin Munby: 'You're always writing in some sense for yourself'

   This summer we've already heard from Will Boast and EC Osondu, and we'll be welcoming Elaine Vilar Madruga and Zhenya Oliinyk on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're heading north with Robin Munby and his short story Of All Who Sorrow, Joy. Munby's narrator is adrift in language, an experience the author says is drawn from his own life. "This is especially about that early phase of learning a language or living in a new place," he explains, "when you have some proficiency, but things are still a struggle." At this stage, Munby continues, comprehension is often a matter of guesswork, but it's only a more extreme version of something that happens in your mother tongue. "You're half hearing what the other person is saying and filling in the gaps, which is often something we naturally do in conversation." The narrator's blanks and missing pieces are echoed in the construction of a story built from fragments that cuts between a discussion about a journey and the journey itself. But it's no accident. "I, as a reader, do very much enjoy writing that is ambiguous in that way," the author says. As a translator from Spanish, Russian and Asturian, Munby's day-to-day tussles with language are very different from his narrator's. But translation itself is still something of a mystery. "A lot of people invest a lot of time in explaining how to do it and analysing how it's done," he says, "and I find all of that fascinating. But I still find myself lost for words in terms of trying to describe how I do it." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Who has been a guest on Fictionable

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Susanna Clarke
• Esther Karin Mngodo
• Jay Boss Rubin

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings