WWII_London_Blitz_East_London (Inf-Lite Teacher, Flickr)

Life After Life is British author Kate Atkinson’s 8^th novel. It’s about the many many lives of Ursula Todd, who is born many times on a winter’s night in England in 1910 and dies in many different ways – Spanish Flu, The London Blitz and various accidents. It’s all about the many twists and turns one person’s life can take and how that affects where we all end up, and at the same time illustrates what it was like to be a woman in 20^th century England.

There is a whole lot of detail about day-to-day English life in the book, including some descriptions of awful-sounding food. I had fun asking Kate about that.

Kate came out to Sydney for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and I caught up with her in her hotel lobby. I started off by asking how Kate came across the idea of telling a story through one individual’s many lives and deaths.

This was first broadcast on 2SER’s Final Draft on June 8.