Elleke Boehmer and Naomi Ishiguro

Writers Elleke Boehmer and Naomi Ishiguro discuss the art of the short story and their most recent collections, To The Volcano, and Other Stories and Escape Routes.

Boehmer is a professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford and a successful novelist and biographer. Her second collection of short stories To the Volcano tilts between north and south, ambition and tradition, and light and dark. Characters include an African student in England longing for her desert home and an Argentinian travel agent agonising about joining her boyfriend in New York.

‘Elleke Boehmer traces the scars left on the psyche by the tortuous histories of the South’ – J M Coetzee

Ishiguro is a former bookseller, and Escape Routes is her first collection of short stories. The stories are all characterised by an unsettling magic. A space-obsessed child conjures up a vortex in an airing cupboard, and two newlyweds find their lives inhibited by a giant and watchful stuffed bear.

‘Stories that start like delicate webs and finish like unbreakable wire traps.’ – Neil Gaiman