Here in the northern hemisphere it's getting misty and mellow all over again. Time for Autumn 2025 and another fruitful harvest of podcasts, ripened to the core. Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Caroline Clark, Kasimma and Ephameron. But we launch into autumn with Helon Habila and his story Paradise.

Habila tells us how, after twenty years of living in the USA, in this story he's trying to "make sense of America".

"History is not past," Habila says, "it's still with us, and we're living the consequences of that history of slavery in America. To even begin to understand the place, you have to grapple with that history."

Paradise puts different Black experiences alongside each other – a Nigerian girl living in Northern Virginia, a young woman whose mother is Nigerian and whose father is white, and a vision of the Brazilian countryside "filled with Black people". But at the heart of the story are two twins, whose ancestors were enslaved on the Strout Estate.

When they return to the house, there's "almost a beautiful symmetry", Habila says, "a cycle coming to a close".

"You can only imagine that, for them, what it must feel like." To be free people, he continues, knowing their ancestors could never have dreamed of the freedoms that they enjoy today, "that's the contradiction, that's the complexity in American history and the American present, where the past is always in conflict with the present".

Some people want to erase the evidence, Habila adds, to "rewrite history. They want to claim that the slaves were actually happier being slaves than Black people are today."

The pressure on academics, the new boldness of people in power to say out loud what could only be said before in a whisper is "scary" he says, but he has to go on. "The only thing one can do as an artist is just to remind people and historicise these things and try to turn it into art."

Next time, Caroline Clark will be talking about the inevitable pain of the writing life and her short story I Will Go.

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This summer series of podcasts has taken us from the snow and ice of AL Kennedy's Expedition Skills to the blunt heat of Ali McClary's Proper Magic, and from the staccato fragments of Pete Segall's Bolex Man to the unstoppable momentum of Dafydd McKimm's The Nosebleed.

We bring this season to a close with Sheyla Smanioto and the haunting threat of her short story Intruder, translated by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis.

Speaking with the help of the interpreter Jaciara Topley Lira, Smanioto tells us that the story came to her with "almost the last sentence", in a dream where "Somebody was holding me by the throat and saying, 'Look how difficult it will be for me not to kill you when I'm choking you'."

She had to deliver that sentence so that she could recreate the feeling she had in the dream, she continues, "And so that's why I needed to trick the reader sometimes."

The slippery first-person plural, the sudden switches between the present and the past and the abrupt swerves into dialogue that keep the reader on their toes are also a challenge for the writer.

"So, in a way," Smanioto adds, "both me and the reader are victims of what the text needed."

Pito's bar is midway along the great journey from the country to the city that Smanioto charts in her novel Out of Earth.

"It's a historical movement," the author says. "It's a movement that brought my family to São Paulo. But when you look at it as a movement, it always looks like it is made up of a mass. But it's never a mass, it's made up of people."

The people who make this journey are left with a "specific type of loneliness", Smanioto continues, an emptiness that she has tried to fill with her writing by "creating a culture that was a sort of dream, a memory of the past".

Even though she calls herself a "very intellectual" writer, dreams are still central to her work.

"I have studied technique," Smanioto says, "I'm a literature graduate. But I can't create anything if I don't feel it in my skin first."

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This summer, we've heard from AL Kennedy, Pete Segall and Ali McClary. We'll be bringing this series to a close with Sheyla Smanioto, but this time Dafydd McKimm steps into the consulting room with his short story The Nosebleed.

McKimm tells us how The Nosebleed was a story that came to him with the ending already in place, citing the translator Michael Hofmann and his notion of Kafka time, where it's "already too late".

With this type of story, the author says, "You just set the ball rolling and the characters fruitlessly struggle against the inevitability of that ending."

Even though McKimm tries to keep politics out of his stories, it's a notion that feels very 21st century.

"We do certainly seem to be living in a world where, if it wasn't too late ten years ago, it certainly is too late now," he says. "We might be fighting a losing battle."

While the sharp divisions in the bookshop between fantasy and surreal fiction are something of a mirage, McKimm continues, there is still a difference of approach.

"Even though you might write a secondary-world fantasy, where the world is very different to the world we live in," he explains, "it's going to have dragons or whatever, or magic exists, the tone of the world is very similar. Whereas in a surrealist story, or an absurdist story, it's the feverishness of the tone that is turned up. You turn up the dial on your paranoia, on your madness essentially, your internal madness."

Next time we'll be turning up the dial with Sheyla Smanioto and her short story Intruder.

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We've already heard from AL Kennedy and Pete Segall in this summer series of podcasts, and we’ll be hearing from Sheyla Smanioto and Dafydd McKimm over the next few weeks. But this time we're summoning up Ali McClary and her short story Proper Magic.

McClary confesses that the intense friendship between Min and Hazel is drawn from her own experience.

"I hope that all girls, all women have these kinds of friendships," she says, "that feel a little bit magic, a little bit disgusting."

They may not always end well, McClary continues, "but for those brief moments or those long, hot summers, they're really beautiful, and they're the most important thing in people's lives".

The trauma buried at the core of Proper Magic emerged out of the writing process. And it was only when looking back at the story and starting to edit that the author says she realised "how dark and how heavy the secret at the heart of the story is".

"When grief hits," McClary explains, "or there's a big cataclysmic event in someone's life, I think it's fairly common that people slip out of reality a little bit. Everything becomes slightly unreal, they see everything with an entirely different lens because the world as they have known it for so long has been completely shattered."

We'll be looking beyond the real with Dafydd McKimm next time, and his short story The Nosebleed.

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We began this Summer series of podcasts with AL Kennedy arguing that the empathy which powers fiction makes writing it a political act. We'll be talking fiction – or maybe politics – with Sheyla Smanioto, Ali McClary and Dafydd McKimm over the next few weeks. But this time we're zooming in on Pete Segall and his story Bolex Man.

Segall tells us that this series of snapshots emerged after he took up analogue photography. He was wandering around the neighbourhood taking pictures of "the same buildings, the same places" and he began to ask himself "if there are posts in some kind of Facebook group about 'Is there this weird guy taking pictures of your house?'"

As his fictional neighbourhood and its inhabitants came into focus, it became clear the story was about "looking and looking back and being looked at," he continues, a feeling that is "very modern".

"There's a very ambient feeling of being watched," Segall says, "of being perceived."

Bolex Man is a story assembled out of fragments – an accommodating form for someone who "writes in very small bursts" – and it's up to the reader to fill in the spaces between each frame.

"I don't feel like it's my job as a writer to answer questions," Segall explains. "I feel like it's my job to ask, 'What is going on?' To delineate the experience of not knowing what is going on."

After years in which Segall tried to write "conventional fiction" with plot and character, he's embraced his natural rhythm.

"If that means that a story ends up being four words long," he says, "then a story is four words long. And I am in love with that."

Next time we'll be falling for female friendship with Ali McClary and her short story Proper Magic.

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It's raining in London, but it's time for another issue – and another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Sheyla Smanioto, Pete Segall, Ali McClary and Dafydd McKimm. But we begin Summer 2025 with AL Kennedy, and her icy short story Expedition Skills.

Kennedy says that the story emerged out of the "very strange day" earlier this year which saw the commemoration of Martin Luther King and the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Upstate New York was covered in snow and ice, she explains and "it seemed good to put people in that weirdness of first snow, because it always looks like a clean start".

The author was sitting at home "not watching the inauguration… the most not-watched inauguration in history", and thinking about wealth.

"It is a time when the wealthy are just inconceivably wealthy," she says, "and other people are always dodging complete destitution."

In Expedition Skills, Martin wants to wander across boundaries like kids, who can "go wherever they like". But the limits on our freedoms are never quite as solid as they might look, Kennedy argues, "because a lot of policing and democracy and power is about consent. And if you don't consent, the people in charge, they're always a massively smaller number."

If people want to keep politics out of fiction, "you'd have to keep people out," she continues.

"Writing well, trying to create characters that people can enter into and practise empathy, and reverse the psychological pressure that is online, that's a political act. I'm sorry, it just is. That's why people like Erdoğan and Trump and Bolsonaro and all the variety of dictators who are floating about, that's why they'll arrest you. That's why they'll suppress your work. That's why they like burning books."

Kennedy's latest novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, features a set of major characters who are all damaged in one way or another, but "that's life", says the author. "Very hard to not have trauma. I don't even know if it's entirely healthy to not have any obstacles."

And it's either great pain or great joy that delivers the extraordinary emotional spike that fiction requires. Writing about the positive side may be "very difficult", Kennedy adds, but only focusing on the bad things in life would be "psychopathic. It's just, buckle up and try to make the good stuff interesting."

Next time, we'll be looking for the good stuff with Pete Segall and his short story Bolex Man.

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This spring we've heard from Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods already. But we bring this series to a close with Susanna Clarke and her short story The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City.

Clarke tells us that it's a story she's been thinking about for some time.

"I have never really stopped thinking about Strange and Norrell," she says. "It's a world that keeps summoning me back."

In the novel, The Raven King was very young when he first arrived in England, Clarke explains, "and I had an idea that he wasn't too happy. And also that he would be surrounded by politicians."

Even though The King of the North is not a fairy himself, she continues, "his fairy upbringing has had a massive influence on him, and he's never really quite at home with human beings. He ends up in this middle space, not quite one thing and not quite another. And that's kind of useful to him, but it's also quite lonely."

Clarke remembers learning at school that the Norman conquest was a wonderful thing, but it was actually a massive upheaval.

"Nobody quite realised that of course it's being conquered by the French," she says. "And that, particularly for the north, was an absolutely traumatic thing."

Just as in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke found that exploring the differences between her human characters "made a little space to put the fairies in".

"In a fantastical story, you've got to play with things being very fantastical and alien, and also try to make them slightly humdrum, so that they become believable."

The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is full of Clarkean weather, the "thick mist" around Durham, the rain falling across the New Castle on the Tyne in "grey, slanting lines", and the author confesses she feels at home in the rain.

"If you look at Strange and Norrell," she says, "most of it is set in winter. I think, grudgingly, there are a few chapters set in summer."

The rain and wind even seep inside the house in Piranesi, another novel poised like its author between Classicism and the Romantics.

"I like the formality of 19th-century prose," she says, "but I always want to push it out of a 19th-century shape and do something different with it."

Clarke found she was pushed to do something different herself, when her long struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome made her put aside the sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and focus on "things that felt feasible". But she hasn't left it behind.

"I'm still moving towards it," she says, "and I do hope to have the energy and just the brains to write it. It's far from abandoned. It's absolutely what I want to do with my life."

Fatigue and brain fog may make it harder to write, Clarke admits, but they don't bring the creative process to a halt.

"Stories and fiction don't really come from that place," she declares, "at least they don't in me. They come from my imagination, from my unconscious, and those things aren't ill. They're fine."

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We've already welcomed Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett and PR Woods in this Spring series, and Susanna Clarke will be joining us next time. But now we're hearing from Jeremy Wikeley with his short story Kent's Oak.

According to Wikeley, his main character's disconnected connection with his neighbours on the estate is just how it felt when he was growing up in the suburbs of a small town.

"You were very familiar with a lot of places and a lot of things," he says, "and you were at home. But you didn't have many opportunities to express that with other people and therefore were you really at home?"

As someone who has "always felt very English and sort of not English," Wikeley explains, Englishness is "a big hobbyhorse of mine – what it is, how it feels".

There's an element of disconnection buried in the heart of Englishness, he continues. "Nature writing, which is tied up with Englishness, is often a response to the destruction of the countryside and the destruction of nature. And so the time element of it is always loaded with loss, but also with nostalgia."

But for Wikeley these losses are an inevitable part of being human.

"I don't have a problem with cutting down trees," he says, "which is maybe not what you were expecting from this story… as long as you're doing it for a reason."

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We've already heard from Fríða Ísberg and Bronia Flett in this Spring series, and we'll be welcoming Susanna Clarke and Jeremy Wikeley on to the Fictionable podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're going back in time with PR Woods and her short story Our Lady of Sorrows.

Woods tells us how Sister Avis came to her after someone wrote to the Guardian about Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall arguing "It's a great story, but it didn't happen like that."

In the 16th century, the dissolution of the monasteries was a great upheaval, Woods says, so she asked herself "how did it actually happen? You've got this massive, fundamental change in the landscape of England, the literal landscape – houses and buildings being demolished – but also the religious landscape. I was just interested in the logistics of of it."

"An awful lot of the monks and the friars could become what we would essentially think of as parish priests now," she continues. "But that obviously wasn't an option for the women. So where did they all go?"

While Woods confesses a fascination with the Tudors, she's no fan of Henry VIII.

"He was a tyrant," she says, "he was dreadful to women, to all his wives in one way and another."

But Woods imagines that Sister Avis would have seen this awful king for what he was.

"I like to think that she tutted whenever she heard rumours about what Henry VIII was doing, that she was disappointed by him again and again."

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Fríða Ísberg got this Spring series of podcasts started, with a dialogue on monologues and a reading from her short story Fingers, translated by Larissa Kyzer. We'll be welcoming Susanna Clarke, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods on to the podcast over the next few weeks, but right here and right now we're talking transformation with Bronia Flett.

Flett tells us how her short story Leopard, Spots fell into her lap, and explains why she wanted to put female friendship under the lens.

"We do form these close bonds," she says, "and more often than not they're our defining relationships in our lives."

Women who are very close to each other may tell each other a lot, Flett continues, but "it might not necessarily be positive conversation all the time. And we are still keeping things from each other, and we are still inventing ourselves in the presence of other people."

This constant negotiation of the self with others begins at a very early age, she argues, confessing that the argument between two children in Leopard, Spots was plucked from life.

"We're always telling other people who we think they are and should be," Flett says, "and insisting on who we are and being told, 'No, you're not'."

Maybe some of us are predisposed to "brooding on these issues", she admits, but – for the writer – "looking back for those moments where you think 'Oh, why did I behave like that? Who was that person who behaved like that?' That's where you start to get these universal truths."

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Everything is changing, but one thing you can rely on is a new set of stories and a new series of podcasts from Fictionable. Spring 2025 brings us stories from Susanna Clarke, Bronia Flett, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods – we'll be hearing from them all over the next few weeks. But we begin with Fríða Ísberg and her short story Fingers, translated by Larissa Kyzer.

Like much of her work, Ísberg explains, Fingers began with the cadence of a character's thought.

"You don't need to know what the mother's name is," she says, "or the job description, or where they live. You don't need to know that at the beginning, you just really need the rhythm of that person. It's like knitting a sweater. You just need to know what kind of pattern you are doing and then you can just do the whole thing."

The narrator in Fingers is woven from the anxious expectations that surround relationships in the 21st century.

"It's really hard to meet the standards that we have towards the love match these days," Ísberg says.

In western societies, women are shaking off the constraints imposed on them and refusing to "sacrifice their standards".

"Power is shifting, absolutely," Ísberg says, noting that "The Icelandic word for marriage is brúðkaup, which is 'bridal buy'."

The glass may be half full for gender equality in Iceland – a country currently governed by a coalition led entirely by women – but violence against women is still a reality Ísberg can't ignore.

"I have three close friends who have had their former boyfriends just completely lose it," she says, "breaking into their apartments or staying outside their house or their car. It's really threatening and they don't see it as a threat, because they see it as a romantic gesture."

In a world where people are increasingly demanding simple narratives from their political leaders, fiction can help us navigate the messy complications of real life.

"For me," Ísberg says, "it's always more trying to understand the two different views."

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After hearing from Helga Schubert, Ben Sorgiovanni, Julian George and Rachida Lamrabet, we bring this Winter series of podcasts to a close with Joanna Kavenna and her short story Notes on the Future.

Kavenna tells us how this story was born from an obsession with patterns and a robust detachment from her characters.

"I like to have quite questing narrators," she says, "who are desperately trying to find meaning in a world that keeps depriving them of meaning. Which is probably quite autobiographical."

When you’re writing, Kavenna continues, you’re constantly forced up against the gap between language and the world. But it’s a question that none of us can avoid.

"All of us are in this," she explains, "whether we like to be or not. And it’s this strange illogic logic that we’re all existing within."

While the characters in Kavenna’s novel A Field Guide to Reality are in pursuit of a book that will answer all their questions, Notes on the Future begins when a book which promises to reveal the future is found. But according to Kavenna the future is "a massive area of complete, unknowable fiction" for us all.

"There’s something quite powerful about the predictions of the future that we all make," she says, "because we’re more likely – potentially – to unravel things towards them."

Even if we could conjure a world in which we know everything, it’s not clear that we would want to take that path.

"Would we want to know the full remit of the future," Kavenna asks, "or would that be actually the most horrifying nightmare of all?"

The AI-driven future imagined in the author’s novel Zed takes her characters dangerously close to that precipice.

"I felt really sorry for them," she admits, "because I put them in this dystopia, which seemed really unfair after spending so long with them."

Five years after Zed hit the shelves, that future is coming down the track with alarming speed.

"If you’re going to be compelled to live in a certain reality," Kavenna says, "it would be nice to be asked. And I think that’s the major political question that we now have."

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In this Winter season we've already heard from Helga Schubert, Ben Sorgiovanni and Julian George. Joanna Kavenna will be rounding off the series next time, but right here and now we welcome Rachida Lamrabet and her short story Two Girls on Bicycles, translated by Johanna McCalmont.

Lamrabet recalls how this story was set in motion by a chance encounter with an old friend, which brought back memories of pedal-powered escapades while she was a teenager.

"Everyone had a bike," she remembers. "If you didn't have a bike you'd steal a bike…"

Her character decides to leave her childhood behind, a choice that always comes "with a cost", Lamrabet says.

"We're living in a society, especially in western Europe, where apparently it isn't possible to have a compromise between different worlds, different backgrounds. Very often we are led to believe that you cannot have both, you have to make a choice."

The unequal society in which we live is marked by divisions of class and race which could only be addressed through radical change, she continues. "Those who want to maintain the status quo, they are not in favour of that movement."

There are signs that Belgium is beginning to confront its colonial past, but according to Lamrabet "we still have difficulty facing what we did".

"This country cannot continue to hide itself," she says. "It must confront that history."

Perhaps fiction, which is powered by empathy, can play a part.

"It will not change the world overnight," Lamrabet admits, "but I think it's important to take that platform, to introduce these different stories and to tell your perspective."

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So far we've heard from Helga Schubert and Ben Sorgiovanni in this Winter season. We'll be welcoming Joanna Kavenna and Rachida Lamrabet over the next couple of weeks, but for this feature we present Julian George and The Movie Lovers.

George tells us how this short story emerged from the classic 1950s sitcom, The Honeymooners.

"I just thought of the character played by Audrey Meadows, Alice," he says. "Sometimes that character wanted something else, or there were moments of unexpected poignancy."

The cinema on East 14th Street where his two movie lovers meet was a "real picture palace", George continues. "I don't know if Charlie Chaplin or Al Jolson or Jimmy Cagney ever went there, but I like to think they did."

There may be plenty of gaps in the history of the Imperial for the writer of fiction to explore, but George was determined to find room to experiment in his novella Bebe, a fantasia on the life of Richard Nixon's friend, confidant and fixer Bebe Rebozo.

"I could have written this rather straightforward book," he explains, but "I have to keep myself entertained. I like to have a laugh."

Writing may be fun, but as a poet George is keenly aware of the need to measure out his prose, beat by beat.

"I want it to sing," he says, "but the song might be a darker one."

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This Winter series of podcasts got underway with Helga Schubert, who told us how she put together her short story On Getting Up from pieces of her past. This season we'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet and Julian George, but this time we meet Ben Sorgiovanni and his story No One Here Knows You.

He tells us how this story grew out of a philosophical thought experiment about how you would know there was a tiger in a forest if you'd never seen it, and why his characters were looking for a tiger, not a mouse.

"I think it's quite symbolically rich, this idea of a tiger," Sorgiovanni says. "I don't know exactly what it symbolises in the story, but I like the idea of the tiger there, in the national park somewhere, but out of view."

He reveals that – as it happens – he went to India and didn't see a tiger. But the line between his own experience and the experiences of his characters is something he still wants to explore.

"There are a whole bunch of interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between a philosophical article – which advances an argument – and a short story – which has a conclusion, but doesn't necessarily have an argument in the same sense."

Perhaps a subject for further study.

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As the world lurches into 2025 we launch into another series of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet, Ben Sorgiovanni and Julian George over the next few weeks, but we start with Helga Schubert and her short story On Getting Up, translated by Aaron Sayne and Lillian M Banks.

Banks turns interpreter as Schubert explains how this story was awakened by an appearance on a panel discussing one of German literature's most prestigious awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize.

"The joke is," Schubert says, "the only reason I was even selected as a jury member was because I hadn't been allowed to take part when I was invited as an author in back in 1980."

It's a story that had to bide its time, Schubert continues. "I had to wait until my mother died, because I didn't want to subject her to the truth about this whole thing."

The stories in On Getting Up are all true, she insists, "They're all fragments, like ruins, or rubble I've come across in my life."

These pieces are then assembled in an almost mathematical construction to make a coherent whole.

"Everything has to add up precisely," Schubert explains, "nothing is coincidental… It's really as if I were building something, a house for example. It's as if I'm sewing a patchwork quilt."

Her training as a psychotherapist has helped the author distance herself from her own work – a vital skill for a writer, Schubert maintains. "Without this distance you wouldn’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel."

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Last year we heard from Daisy Johnson, Judith Vanistendael, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb. We bring our Autumn series to a close – just in time for Winter – with Esther Karin Mngodo and the translator Jay Boss Rubin, who join us to talk about First Date.

Mngodo tells us how this story ate another of her short stories, Without Sun.

"It came from the idea of how things are within other things," she says, "how everything is interconnected."

In First Date, the links stretch across an entire millennium. Mngodo feels that we still have much in common with each other, even across vast distances of time and space.

"The human experience, whether you're in Tanzania, or you're in London, or in America, it's still the same," she explains. "We still feel fear, we still have hope. We still want to love and be loved."

Our experiences may be the same, but there are still tensions in the ways we reflect them in language, even when it is our mother tongue.

"We tend to believe that Swahili is this very beautiful language that is locked with the great writers like Shaaban Roberts," Mngodo says. "The rest of us are just aspiring to get there. And so for most of my life I felt that I wasn't good enough in the Swahili that I spoke or wrote."

It was when she first went to the US and Canada to study that she began to embrace writing in Swahili, a decision that affected her on the deepest levels.

"It was during that time that I realised I started dreaming in Swahili," she recalls.

With a language like Swahili, these complications are rooted in the complexities of a contested history.

"For people who like to argue," Rubin says, "you can argue that Swahili is detrimental to local indigenous languages. They're being wiped out because Swahili is used as a national and regional language. Now you could also say the same thing about what English is doing to Swahili."

But it's also very possible for languages "to enrich one another", he continues. "There's not like a net sum, where when more English comes in Swahili gets pushed out, or vice versa."

For Mngodo the question of what language to write in goes beyond "who owns the language".

"The language belongs to me," she insists, "if I can express through it.

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We opened this Autumn season with Daisy Johnson and followed up with Judith Vanistendael and Scott Jacobs. We'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo over the next week or so, but this episode is devoted to Hannah Webb and her short story Titanic.

While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists that her story is definitely not autobiographical.

"I have been on one of those holidays," she says, "but it didn't end up like that. There was much less cruelty."

Under the surface, she explains, Titanic is driven by technology.

"Teenagers have been struggling with their mental health for a long, long time. But I suppose phones do bring this new aspect into it of never being able to turn off. And the internet is this vast space where there's endless things you could be looking at. Sometimes it's very difficult to know when to stop looking."

In our connected world, you're never far from the extremes, Webb continues, extremes that are often rewarded by the algorithm. But that unreality doesn't make the experience any less important.

"The emotions that you feel from it are happening in the same body," she says, "and you're going to have the same mind. It's good to retain perspective, but at the same time it can be dismissed too easily as not real."

The world always feels like it's breaking, she adds, but Webb hasn't given up hope. "While there's maybe a lot of uncertainty, part of that uncertainty is also possibility."

We'll be exploring possible futures with Esther Karin Mngodo next time.

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This season we've already heard from Daisy Johnson and Judith Vanistendael. Over the next few weeks we'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo and Hannah Webb, but this time we welcome Scott Jacobs and his short story Be Careful Who Your Friends Are.

According to Jacobs, this curious tale was a "real-life experience".

"I changed the names, to protect the innocent," he says, "including the name of the restaurant."

But the last-minute invitation, the bottle of Primitivo, the bowler hat and that curious note were all drawn from life.

The story gave Jacobs a chance to examine the sharp divisions of social class in New York City during the 1990s, and to offer a glimpse into the rarefied world of Manhattan's Upper East Side.

"You really had a sense of the dichotomy in society," he explains, "the haves, the have-nots."

After time as a marketing executive and as a lawyer, writing is Jacobs' third career. And it's one that combines the skills he learned in marketing with the linguistic precision he honed in the legal profession – that and his own "creative juices".

We'll be talking with Hannah Webb next time.

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In the first of our Autumn podcasts, Daisy Johnson told us how she was living on the edge when she was writing her collection The Hotel, and read from her short story Conference. Over the course of this season we'll be ranging all round the world to hear from Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but this time Judith Vanistendael explains why The Small Story is very close to home.

This graphic short started when she began thinking about her own family, and how the funny story her grandfather Jef told about his bike trip to France in 1940 was actually "part of big historical events".

"I never thought of my grandparents in a political way," Vanistendael says. "But they were involved, without even wanting to be."

The writer explains how she didn't know much about the history that lies under her story, with millions of people on the move as the Germans advanced and hundreds of thousands of young Belgian men sent to the south of France to train. And beyond these bare facts, she admits it's difficult to tell whether the story Jef told was really true: "My grandfather was a good storyteller."

The second world war still looms large in Belgium, Vanistendael continues, because it was so tough.

"We're a small country, we're quite new," she explains. "We were made in the 1830s by everybody around us. We do not trust power, or big stories."

One of the large stories that runs through Vanistendael's work is the experience of refugees. Her first graphic novel, Dance by the Light of the Moon, is an autobiographical story about her first relationship.

"I was in love with a Togolese, Muslim refugee," she says, "and it seems as if this first love has defined my storytelling."

Human beings have always been restless, she continues, but the arbitrary boundaries of the nation state have changed everything. "Being on the move in this world, the way it is organised, is very difficult."

Over recent years, Vanistendael has started using digital techniques alongside more traditional ways of making images and she doesn't rule out the possibility that comic artists will be replaced by AI. But she's confident that artists will always find ways to use their skills.

"I don't know the future," she says, "but I'm not that afraid."

Next time we'll be looking ahead with Scott Jacobs.

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