Our host Vick Hope is joined by Karin Slaughter.
Karin is one of the world’s most well-known and popular crime writers. Since publishing her debut novel, Blindsighted, in 2001, she has gone on to sell more than 40 million copies of her books internationally, including the hugely popular Grant County and Will Trent series.
Karin is known for reaching beyond simple formulas of suspense and satisfying resolution. Instead she chooses to explore the darker side of humanity, criminal psychology and the systemic violence against women both in and outside of the home. She is a long time advocate for victims of sexual violence, and her books hold a mirror up to society, and crucially, emphasise female agency from the perspective of the victim.
Outside of her writing, Karin is also the founder of the Save the Libraries project – a nonprofit organisation dedicated to supporting local libraries in Atlanta, Georgia – the city where she grew up and continues to draw inspiration from in her writing.
Karin has adapted a number of her works for TV and is currently showrunner for The Good Daughter, which will star Meghann Fahy and Rose Byrne. Her forthcoming novel, The Secrets We Hide, publishes on the 18th of June, and is the second book in her bestselling North Fall series, which sees a quiet town shattered in the wake of a brutal attack.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Karin’s five most influential books by women.
‘Heathcliff is a terrible person, Kathy is kind of a whiny bitch and Linton is so up his own ass if you look at it from an adult perspective […] it is just awful people. But I love the book so much and I love my evolution of my understanding of the book that I actually borrowed names for Blindsighted: you have Sara Linton, there’s a Heathcliff in there so I did borrow a little from that.’
‘It was a revelation to me with Flannery O’ Connor for her to write about writing. I’ve never thought about writers as human beings who control language and the way she utilised language and dialect and spoke about specific Southern stories was amazing to me.’
‘I read this as a teenager, thirteen or fourteen maybe, and first of all it’s very pacy, people forget that, the pace of it from a technical point of view is just very interesting to study because it moves so quickly but it’s not telling a lot, but there’s tension in every word and that is a real talent – she was incredibly talented as a writer.’
‘It’s a rite of passage in the South, or it was when I was a child, to read this book. On the surface, it is quite amazing, it’s a saga, it’s a love story, it’s about war, about good men and bad men and Scarlett O’ Hara as a character is very well developed and indicative of a lot of the struggles that women go through.’
‘Barbara Gowdy in that book is so funny. I mean she is just a revelation, the voice of the character is such a distinctive form of storytelling, I mean something happens, there is a plot, but it’s kind of about nothing, it’s about a family getting along and not getting along and living their lives. The narrator is a revelation – it’s one of those books where you’re reading it and laughing so hard you can’t see the words.’
