Field Ramble with Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall needs little introduction. Twice nominated for the Man-Booker Prize and the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, she has written ten highly acclaimed novels and short story collections. 

This August she returns with her latest novel Helm, the multi-millennial tale of the strange and seductive wind which haunts the Eden Valley of her native Cumbria. The story is one that she has been unable to walk away from; a twenty year project spanning much of her career as a novelist. It is also the first to carry a maker’s mark, a guarantee of its provenance from both author and publisher (Faber) that Helm is entirely human written. 

In our wide-ranging interview we discuss the dangers presented by AI to the arts, the struggles faced in capturing such an elusive presence on the page and the enduring pull of this particular story for her.

‘Sarah Hall’s new novel Helm is incandescently good. It is sexy and funny and erudite and strange, and the prose is dizzyingly good. Up there with her best.’ 

Sarah Perry

‘I’m awed … I wouldn’t think a novel could be at once so taut and so multifarious, expanding one’s sense of what fiction can do.’ 

Sarah Moss

‘Sarah Hall’s writing has conquered the body and the soul and now it conquers the wind itself. She gets better with every word she writes.’ 

Daisy Johnson

Music: Ian Hawgood - A Delicate Connection Not Lightly Broken 

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