What do Renaissance frescoes and Victorian nonsense poetry have to offer the modern novel? Quite a lot, according to Ali Smith, who joins us in this week's podcast to talk about her Booker-longlisted How to Be Both. Set partly in the present day and partly in 15th-century Italy, the novel takes not only its subject and theme but also its structure from the technique of fresco painting used by the artist Francesco del Cossa.
With her, in a conversation recorded at the Edinburgh international book festival, is the critic Gillian Beer, author of books about Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf. They discuss the the magic of time, the sanity of nonsense and the relationship between fiction and scientific discovery.
Reading list:
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
Darwin's Plots by Gillian Beer (Cambridge University Press)
Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: the Collected Poems of Lewis Carroll, edited by Gillian Beer
