Marina Benjamin Interviewed by Sophie Ratcliffe

Writer and editor Marina Benjamin talks about her new collection of essays on the tasks once termed ‘women’s work’ and argues that a woman’s true work may lie at the heart of her humanity.

Benjamin draws on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf as she struggles to overcome gender conditioning that she says pulls her back into ‘the mud-world of pre-feminism’. She looks at her relationships with her family, upbringing as the child of immigrants, looking after her mother, seeing her teenager move out of home, and at her relationships with community, her body and language itself.

Benjamin is author of The Middlepause, Rocket Dreams, and Last Days in Babylon. She is a senior editor at the digital magazine Aeon and is a former arts editor of the New Statesman. Here she talks to writer and literary critic Sophie Ratcliffe, author of The Lost Properties of Love.