Will Harris: A Brother, and One Big Lie

Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved.

A warm, thoughtful conversation between two writers about invention, memory and what gets lost the moment your first book comes out.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:28 Being young and wanting to write

00:02:46 Greyhound buses across America

00:06:14 When notes give you too much information

00:07:56 How you can tell when someone writes from a photograph

00:12:12 Publishing a first collection

00:13:32 RENDANG, identity and being marketed

00:14:54 "Am I British? Am I mixed?"

00:16:30 Invented worlds and invented selves

00:18:58 Poetry as a form of truth telling

00:21:41 The one big lie behind Brother Poem

00:24:14 The family stories that shape us

00:27:46 Children arrive already formed

00:30:43 The fiction project that became a poem

00:35:55 The White Jumper

00:40:39 Poems that change form when read aloud

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