Linda Mannheim: 'What is a happy ending?'

In this Winter series of podcasts, we'll be hearing from Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack, Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan. We start off with Linda Mannheim, who joined us down the line from Berlin.

Mannheim explains how the central character in her story Those Last Days appeared to her "out of the blue" and how she found her fiction inexorably drawn back to her childhood in Washington Heights.

Things were a little different back then to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical – there was certainly less singing and dancing – but what is writing for, she asks, if not to explore the difficult subjects that are part of life?

Growing up in "a refugee neighbourhood", the sense that there are places you can never go back to was "really, really big", Mannheim adds. "The only way I could go back there was by writing about it."

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