London Writers' Salon

#161: Sarah Hall — Crafting Powerful Prose: Short Stories, Intuition, Landscape & Creative Freedom

Episode Summary

Sarah Hall—twice Booker Prize–nominated author and the only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice—on crafting fiction that is both lush and uncompromising, and how to captivate readers on the sentence level while staying true to creative freedom.

Episode Notes

Sarah Hall—twice Booker Prize–nominated author and the only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice—on crafting fiction that is both lush and uncompromising, and how to captivate readers on the sentence level while staying true to creative freedom.

We discuss:

• Her early reading life in the countryside and the characters who first sparked her imagination
• Lessons learned from an “unpublishable” first novel and how Haweswater found its true form
• The discipline and intuition behind her writing process and when to share drafts
• Why handwriting first drafts rekindled a sense of play and sharpened her editing
• How to build short stories that hold “the world on a pin” and reverberate beyond the page
• Giving voice to Britain’s only named wind in Helm and weaving folklore, climate themes, and playfulness
• Discerning a story’s ending and sustaining joy in the writing process
   

About Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall is one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary authors. Twice nominated for the Booker Prize and the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, she is the author of ten acclaimed novels and short story collections, including Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, and Burntcoat. Her latest novel, Helm, blends myth, climate anxiety, and playful storytelling to bring Britain’s only named wind to life.

Resources and Links:

• 📑Interview Transcript
• Helm
• The Helm Wind, the only named wind in Britain - the Met Office
• Sarah’s Website
• Sarah’s books
  • Haweswater
  • The Electric Michelangelo
  • How to Paint a Dead Man
  • The Carhullan Army
  • Burntcoat
• “The Grotesques” - BBC National Short Story Award Winner
• Interview with Sarah Hall in The Guardian
• Faber & Faber - Sarah’s publisher
• Lee Brackstone - Sarah’s editor
• Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien
• Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan
• Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
• Light Years by James Salter
• Hilary Mantel’s Website