This week, we're sitting down (on a gorgeously tropical beach, no less) with debut YA author Sharada Keats. Sharada's book These Stolen Lives is a gripping, powerfully resonant story of colonisation, resistance, and whacking power across the head with truth - as well as humour, drama, family and found family, and a swoonsome romance. We had a hugely fun and illuminating chat with Sharada about her life, her career, her creative work (and where her writing is going next), and - if you're ready - you can settle back and listen to it all, right now. Sweet!

Books mentioned this week include Sharada's own:

The Poetical Institute's Particular Powers of Vegetables and Fruit

These Stolen Lives

This Shattered Promise (forthcoming)

And the books that shaped her include:

Arabella and Mortimer, by Joan Aiken

The work of Enid Blyton

The work of Roald Dahl

The work of Dick King-Smith

The work of Diana Wynne Jones, in particular Archer's Goon

Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien

The Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Lewis

The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper

Blitzcat, by Robert Westall

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine l'Engle

The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

The Halfmen of O, by Maurice Gee

I Like This Poem, published by Puffin

The Rattlebag, by Seamus Heaney

The Crone, by James Herbert Brennan

Dune, by Frank Herbert

The work of Iain M. Banks

The work of Andre Norton

The work of Orson Scott Card

The work of Jane Yolen

The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams

The work of John Steinbeck

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

The work of Jane Austen

Anne of Green Gables, by LM Montgomery

Shitty First Draft, by Anne Lamott

Talks by Malorie Blackman and Patrice Lawrence

Towards Asmara, by Thomas Kenneally

The work of Langston Hughes

The work of Wole Soyinka

The work of Rabinadrath Tagore

The work of Maya Angelou

The work of John Agard

The work of Imtiaz Dharker

The work of Tracy Chapman

The work of Ted Hughes

The work of Seamus Heaney

The work of Michael Rosen

The work of Spike Milligan

The work of Roger McGough

The work of Wislawa Szymborska

The work of Andrei Voznesensky

The work of Miroslav Holub

The work of CP Cavafy

Sword of the Sun, by Sinéad O'Hart

The World Between the Rain, by Susan Cahill

People Like Stars, by Patrice Lawrence

Tidemagic, by Claire Harlow

Mission: Microraptor, by Philip Kavvadias

The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells

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