The High Low

From Prince George memes (@garyjanetti) to vegan abuse (last week journalist William Sitwell was sacked from the Waitrose Food magazine, for his jokes about killing vegans) via the healthiest/ unhealthiest high streets in the UK, as voted by The Royal Society of Public Health. Edinburgh won, Grimsby lost, and you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. Today we have author Olivia Sudjic on the show to discuss her new essay, Exposure, about the anxiety that threatened to engulf her after her debut novel, Sympathy, became a literary success. Part literary criticism, drawing on some of her favourite works by female authors, Sudjic’s intelligent, sharp, thoughtful and deeply confronting essay discusses not just anxiety but all of its merry cohorts: insomnia, self-surveillance, self-loathing, sabotage, imposter syndrome and the gender imbalance when it comes to critiquing women’s fiction (as Roxane Gay points out, Knausgård is never called a ‘diarist‘.) Sudjic discusses what it means to be a publish