Growing together through chats with the best creatives from all over the world. Everything you want to know, and didn't know you wanted to know, without the formality and myth of 'greatness'. Part of the San Clemente magazine.
Claire Adam is a novelist born and raised in Trinidad, who studied Physics at Brown University before settling in London. Her debut novel Golden Child won the Desmond Elliott Prize, the McKitterick Prize, and the Authors Club Best First Novel Award, and was named one of the BBC's 100 Novels that Changed the World.
In this episode, Grace talks to Claire about finding the voice of a reluctant narrator, what fiction can do that facts cannot, and why once you feel something in a book, it stays with you permanently. Love Forms was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. The Booker judges called it "a rare and low-pitched achievement" that "reads like a hushed conversation overheard in the next room." The Times described it as "every bit as good as her debut" and likened it to "a Claire Keegan story expanded by Elizabeth Strout." The FT said it "achieves a sort of alchemy."
Find the book here (https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571339570-love-forms/?srsltid=AfmBOop8DTLecmjsCoOPKe34bMHqk1oNspEFCbpm-lYhpRIVIFj6ETtb) or get it your local seller.
20 Apr 2026
Alex Kadis: AI in Music, Writing Funny Women, Second Generation Immigration in the 70's
Alex Kadis is a writer, music journalist and industry consultant. Half-British, half-Greek, she grew up in Leyton and Walthamstow and studied English Literature at Goldsmiths. She was Features Editor at Smash Hits in its heyday and has written for Sunday Times Style and Q Magazine, before moving into artist management and consultancy.
Her debut novel Big Nobody is out now with Penguin Random House. Grace and Alex talk about the book's 1970s East London setting, the push and pull of immigrant identity, what it means to finally feel like a somebody, and what AI can and can't do with art. Xochitl Gonzalez called it a novel that "broke my heart one minute and had me really laughing the next." Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review, and the Guardian wrote that Kadis has produced "a debut that sparkles like Marc Bolan's eye makeup." Pandora Sykes called it "riotously funny, nostalgic, and immensely touching."
Get the book here (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/471672/big-nobody-by-kadis-alex/9781529155303) or at your local seller.
15 Apr 2026
Ashley Hickson-Lovence: Ireland, Writing as Music and Making Life Your Book Club
Ashley Hickson-Lovence is a novelist, poet and lecturer in Creative Writing. He grew up in Hoxton and Holloway and is the author of The 392, Your Show, and Wild East, which won the East Anglian Book Awards 2024 overall and the Diverse Book Awards 2025 YA prize. His poetry collection Why I Am Not a Bus Driver came out in 2025, with the poem "Munster Road" highly commended for Best Single Poem at the Forward Prize and featured in the Forward Prize Book of Poetry 2026.
His new novel About to Fall Apart is out now with Faber. It's been praised by Ferdia Lennon, Christine Anne Foley and Margaret McDonald. As we talk about, it's a real example of how literature can bring us closer to the overlooked figures in our lives. Candice Carty-Williams called The 392 "completely, overwhelmingly in a league of its own." Your Show was praised by The Observer for its "freestyle poetry" and "stirring" storytelling. Wild East earned him a Black Excellence Award nomination for Outstanding Contribution to Literature.
You can get the book here (https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571392681-about-to-fall-apart/?srsltid=AfmBOorwyZyWR7-Yu7AOiIZG83zx3XUcEaKwki2-3V6_eH4t3Q1AKxTj) or at your local seller.
Inside a recent episode
Princess Alia Al-Senussi: Female Artists in the Middle East, Art for Political Change and Patronage
Published 20 Oct 2023 · Transcript excerpt
[…] And so you can, you have both sides and I think art can help explain brutality, it can help explain love, it can help explain society in that moment. And, you know, a really great work of art is able to do that. I think one of the most incredible things I've recently seen was by Doris Salcedo in, in Basel at the Biler Foundation and it's called Palimpsest. And it's this just incredible slab of what you think is concrete. And then as you come closer to it, it's huge, right? It's on the floor. So it's you walk over it. It's little bubbles of water that come up and form names. And then the water resides, what's the word subsides. […]
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