All posts filed under: interviews

Susana M. Morris: “Octavia Butler worked really hard at putting the pieces together”

August 25, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews

For July’s Curious Reading Club interview, I spoke with Susana M. Morris—the author of the fascinating Octavia Butler biography Positive Obsession. Her research and understanding of Butler is both excellent and inviting; not taking the usual academic tone but really engaging with this incredible writer’s work on a human level. She explained what made Butler so interesting and so forward thinking; what her super powers as an author really were. But maybe the moment I […]

Craig Mod: “We’re probably doing a lot of things the wrong way”

March 6, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews
Author Craig Mod on a zoom call, wearing a dark grey baseball cap and light grey long sleeve shirt, his fingers to his head in a gesture of mind explodeyness.

A few weeks back I had a really stimulating conversation with Craig Mod, the bookmaker, writer, photographer and author of Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, which was February’s book of the month at Curious Reading Club. One thing I mentioned in our chat was that Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into […]

Tania Branigan: “Everybody thinks they would have been in the Resistance in wartime.”

November 24, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews

This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do. Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired […]