Hello listeners and welcome to Sad Me of the Past, SEASON 3! We've been in the midst of office-space moves and position reconfiguration, but we are finally back! Today we have Noami Wood for our first episode of the new season! We talk about her upbringing in the UK, a novel about a family of eggs, the “cocoa ending,” the inspiring power of confusion, another transformative English teacher, the sexy moms at the gate, the epiphanic Jenny Zhang, nannying in Paris, launching stories with an essential question, and a form that’s obsessed with its ending. 

Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. As a novelist, her books have won a Jerwood Award, the British Library Hay Festival Prize, and been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Historical Writers Golden Crown. Mrs. Hemingway was a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick in 2014 and a Chanel Bookclub pick in 2023. Her début story collection This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things was published in 2024 by Phoenix (Orion), Nagel und Kimche (Germany) and Morrow (US).

In 2023 she won the  BBC National Short Story Prize with ‘Comorbidities’. Her short stories have also won the Desperate Literature Tbilisi Prize, and been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Prize, and a Society of Authors Prize. Her interests are complicated femininity and transgressive motherhood, and how these fit in the modern workplace. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.