Episode 75 - Rosa Rankin-Gee: Part 1

Rosa Rankin-Gee was one of the first guests on This Writing Life when the podcast was still a glint in its host's eye. We spoke ostensibly about her excellent debut novel The Last Kings of Sark but quickly widened the focus to the challenges of being a first-time and very young novelist, to sitting in large publishing boardrooms and sucking strange sweets.

Part one begins with some idle digital recording chatter - how DO you pronounce WAV? - followed by some idle corporate boardroom chatter, before our host finally gets down to the business of introductions, Bill Callahan, brilliant thoughts, and writer's notebooks. From there we hopped to:

• obsession with youth
• dreams, writing and the perfect thriller
• how do you open a first novel
• how do you create a central character in your first novel?
  
• structuring your first novel
• memory, distortion and poor question-asking
• Sark, cooking and the real-life inspiration for the novel
• writing vs memory-loss
• Jude and Rosa, life and art
• first novels