Interviews: August 2011

Madame Jojo's, Soho, London- March 2009

Speech Debelle is onstage rapping her heart out, an acoustic guitarist creating beautiful grooves around her. Everyone in the room's heart is breaking. My mind is elsewhere: I'm focused on the table piled with books next to her, wondering what they're there for. She seems to gesture to them a lot. In the words of Bill Hicks, 'Ladies and gentlemen, looks like we got ourselves a reader.'

Musician and comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis has always had a literary side to his work, singing songs with a strong narrative structure, creating his own comic book Fuff packed to the gills with smart references to literature and authors and also to the grand tradition of drawing stories in graphic novels.

We thought it was high time you got to know our current writer in residence, the award-winning short story writer Clare Wigfall, as we know her.