On this episode of The London Magazine Podcast, we speak to award-winning cultural critic and novelist Leo Robson. Leo’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Granta and the New Left Review. He works for Literary Review and Granta, and The Boys is his first novel.

In the episode, we talk about evoking London on the page, the strange nostalgia of the 2012 Olympics, the role of humour in serious writing and the virtues of obstinacy.

Timestamps

• 0.32 - The joys of book promotion
• 2.43 - Leo reads an extract from The Boys
• 8.25 - Writing a ‘London’ novel
• 9.51 - The 2012 London Olympics and the legacy of New Labour
• 14.12 - Chronologies, rites of passage and parody
• 16.01 - The writing process and the evocation of place
• 20.49 - Stefan Zweig, Wes Anderson, Alt-J and Mark Fisher’s temporal paradoxes
• 28.22 - Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net and other inspirations
• 30.06 - Light and dark: balancing humour and serious subjects in a novel
• 33.45 - The process: writing cultural criticism vs writing fiction

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