Sep 25, 2022
S5: E8 - Lauren Beukes - Parenting across the multiverses
Today on the podcast I’ll be speaking with Lauren Beukes.
Lauren is the award-winning author of six novels, a collection of short stories, a pop history about South African women, and New York Times best-selling comics. Her work has been translated into 26 languages. Her novel, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer and the survivor who turns the hunt around is now a major AppleTV series with Elisabeth Moss who listeners may know from the Handmaid’s Tale and Mad Men.
Lauren is a former feature journalist, who covered electricity cable thieves, HIV+ beauty pageants, metro cops and homeless sex workers. She’s worked in film and TV, as the director of Glitterboys & Ganglands, a documentary which won Best LGBTI Film at the Atlanta Black Film Festival, and as showrunner and head writer on South Africa’s first half hour animated TV show, Pax Afrika, which ran for 104 episodes on SABC.
Her work has been hailed by the likes of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, George R.R. Martin. She has won several awards over the last ten years, including The Arthur C Clarke Award, The University of Johannesburg Prize, the Strand Critics Choice Award, The Kitschies Red Tentacle, The August Derleth Prize, RT Thriller of the Year, Exclusive Books Booksellers Choice Award and the prestigious Mbokodo Award for women in the creative arts from South Africa’s Department of Arts and Culture.
When asked where she gets her ideas from, Lauren responds “Everywhere. Conversations, observations, watching the cultural shifts and fracture points and weirdnesses in the world. The inside of my head is less a memory palace and more of a hoarder house; full of strange and useless things that sometimes, if I’m lucky, come together in interesting and surprising ways.”
One of these interesting and surprising novels is her latest – Afterland. The story of a mother and son on the run in a post-pandemic America. The pandemic, known as The Manfall means that twelve year old Miles is one of the last boys alive, and his mother, Cole, will protect him at all costs – especially from her own sister. This feminist, high-stakes thriller is a blend of many genres and the perfect post-pandemic read.
Lauren lives in London with her teenage daughter, two trouble cats and a lot of plants.
So today I’ll be talking with Lauren about post-pandemic motherhood, feminism, and literary success. Welcome Lauren.