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Host
Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone
Rebekah is a writer and editor who teaches for The Novel Studio at City St George's, University of London. She loves reading books, writing books, talking about books, collecting books... you get the idea.
The Hypothetical Bookshelf
The Hypothetical Bookshelf is a desert island discs for books. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Whom do we write for? Or The Hypothetical Bookshelf’ this is a podcast that asks writers what other works their writing is in conversation with, looking for the ways new work can make connections between different books on a writer’s and reader’s hypothetical shelf.
Interviewing a different author each time, writers are asked to name five books of fiction or non-fiction that can be put beside their own on that imaginary bookshelf.
Contributors
Guests
Guest
Deepa Anappara
Deepa’s debut novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020. Time included it in ‘The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time’. It has been translated into over twenty languages.
Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour (2023), a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture.
Her second novel, The Last of Earth, was one of BBC’s ‘12 books to read in 2026’.
She was born in Kerala, southern India. Her journalism on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the education of children won the Developing Asia Journalism Awards, the Every Human has Rights Media Awards, and the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism.