Character Study

Novelist Jem Calder reads from I Want You to Be Happy in this passage episode of Character Study, a scene about a hundred pages in, as his two characters go on early dates and feel each other out across a pub table by the river. Jem and Freya talk about writing romance that feels real without being neat, the transactional and inexplicable pulls that draw two mismatched people together, and why a "situationship" can carry the weight of a love story even when you know it won't last. They get into the small, specific power of complimenting a stranger who's dressed a little braver than usual, and then into the harder subject underneath the whole book: attention. Jem and Freya make the case for stepping back from social media to protect your writing: the compounding minutes, the shrinking attention span, the excuse that posting is somehow part of the work. 📚 Further reading mentioned in this episode: – Liadan Ní Chuinn, Every One Still Here (short story collection) – Zadie Smith on living without a phone 🎥 WATCH…

Novelist Jem Calder joins Freya to talk about I Want You to Be Happy, his debut novel about two people trying to fall in love while everything around them is engineered to distract them. Jem’s writing career started with Sally Rooney emailing him about the first story he’d ever finished and now his debut is on the tote bag of every literary it girl this summer. He tells Freya why he’d rather write a novel than a memoir (he’s a self-described cagey person who doesn’t like giving too much of himself away) and why he thinks of fiction as a gift, something a reader can reach for in their worst moments. They chat about how quickly a good line about phones curdles into cliché, why he keeps thousands of words of notes he’ll almost never use and why writing within the constraints of a genre is a form of respect for the writers who came before. A funny, honest conversation between two writers about connection, cringe and what fiction is for. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:44 Book tour vs writing — the "spiritual maths"…

Poet Will Harris reads Speakee Stonehenge, an exclusive sneak peek into the collection of poems he is currently working on, Speakee. It's a piece that keeps circling back on itself, returning to the same small moment in a room full of people, and each time it comes back it has picked something up: a piece of research, an overheard shout, a memory of a stranger's grief. Nothing is explained, and by the end a single ordinary word has quietly turned inside out. It's about who gets to belong somewhere, and how language decides that for us before we've noticed. Will and Freya talk about writing people as names and voices rather than fully fleshed-out characters, why the most poignant moments are when someone stutters or says the wrong thing, and the danger of editing: that in smoothing out the clunky words, you can flatten everything interesting about a sentence. Plus, whether the internet and MFA culture have quietly made all our sentences sound the same. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:11 Speakee — the book Will is…

Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved. A warm, thoughtful conversation between two writers about invention, memory and what gets lost the moment your first book comes out. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:28 Being young and wanting to write 00:02:46 Greyhound buses across America 00:06:14 When notes give you too much…

Screenwriter, artist and Murky Book Prize-winning novelist Sufiyaan Salam reads the opening chapters of Wimmy Road Boyz: three young men in a BMW, cruising towards Manchester's Curry Mile at the start of a night that none of them yet know might be their last together. Sufiyaan and Freya talk about writing as a kind of method acting, how he inhabits his characters so completely that when they're in trouble, he is too, and the film-set principle of "method dressing" that shapes his approach to prose: build the parts of the room the camera will never see, because the reality bleeds through anyway. They discuss the histories buried in the text, from Tipu Sultan to Manto's Toba Tek Singh to Islamic Spain and Partition, and why he likes leaving them there as either a treasure trove or simply texture that feels real. And they talk about the pressure of being one of very few British Pakistani male literary novelists — and why he'd rather write questions than be anyone's spokesman. This is a conversation about the…

Screenwriter and novelist Sufiyaan Salam won the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize for his debut Wimmy Road Boyz. He joins Freya to talk about his novel that follows three young British-Pakistani men across one chaotic night on Manchester's Curry Mile. Sufiyaan, who’s also a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter and animator, tells Freya where the book came from: a real night out where he wanted to tell his friends what he was going through but couldn’t, and wondered if they were holding something back too. They chat about why the novel is built to feel like a rap album rather than a novel, how screenwriting taught him to chase specificity and what it was like to take his dad to the BAFTAs. They also get into whether film audiences really are ruder than book audiences and why saying the dumb idea out loud is worth it if one in ten turns out to be brilliant. A funny, honest conversation between two writers about masculinity, specificity and throwing everything at the wall to tell a story. 🎥 WATCH the full episode 📘 Buy…

This week, a special bonus episode: the prologue of Freya's debut novel, A Real Piece of Work, read by actor Ellie Kendrick. OUT NOW A Real Piece of Work follows Nola, whose memoir about her late sister Darina has become a hit — critics love it, producers want the film rights, and everyone in her family hates it. When an anonymous complaint about the book lands with her publisher, Nola is certain the culprit is one of her own relatives. As the family gathers on the remote island of Lundy to mark the fifth anniversary of Darina's death, Nola sets out to discover who made it before it does irreparable damage. It's a sparkling, spiky story about complicated families, who owns grief, and who gets to tell the story of those who are gone and those left behind. Want to know how Ellie brought Nola to life? Read Freya's interview with her in the Behind the Book series on Substack 📖 Buy A Real Piece of Work 🎧 Listen to the full audiobook 📸 Instagram: @freybromley ✉️ Substack: freyabromley.substack.com 🎙️ And hit…

Novelist Sarvat Hasin reads from the second chapter of her novel Strange Girls — the beginning of Alia's story. Sarvat and Freya talk about how the two narrators of Strange Girls arrived in different voices and tenses: Ava, bold and certain, who could only ever be written in first person, and Alia, quieter, rendered in a storybook third-person past. They discuss the novels woven through the book — Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence — and why an ambiguous relationship that's never named or declared can still change a person completely. Along the way, a conversation about what it means for writing to feel alive: raw, uncertain, and true to life, even when only a few stories have ever really been told. This is a conversation about voice, ambiguity, and the books that live inside the books we write. 🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE 📘 Buy Sarvat Hasin's Strange Girls and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions…

Novelist Sarvat Hasin, author of This Wide Night, You Can't Go Home Again and The Giant Dark , joins Freya to talk about her latest novel Strange Girls a novel that explores the relationship of two former friends forced to reunite at a hen party after a decade apart. She’s written many other award-winning books and is also in a workshop group with Freya, sharing early drafts with one another, which they talk about in this episode. They also discuss why friendship breakups are so much harder to talk about than romantic ones, what theatre taught Sarvat about structure and why she romanticises the mundane moments of her own life (and how that feeds directly into her writing). A funny, honest conversation between two friends about the creative process and everything it touches. 🎥 WATCH the full episode 📘 Buy Sarvat Hasin's Strange Girls and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind…

Author and Boys Book Club co-founder Lucas Oakeley answers listener questions in this Q&A episode of Character Study. Listeners ask Lucas where his creative spark comes from, whether he has a way of dealing with people who interrupt his energy (he doesn't, he thinks friction is good for you), and how he gets back into his novel each time he sits down to write. His tip: never stop writing when you have nothing left to say, stop when you know what comes next, so you always sit down with momentum. He also shares his niche Wikipedia rabbit hole hack for kickstarting creativity, and tells the story of spending a day visiting four London bookshops trying to find his own debut novel on the shelves, and not finding it in a single one. This is a conversation about the writing life and why, by bookshop four, he was absolutely fuming. 🎥 Watch on YouTube 📘 Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley 📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's…

Author and Boys Book Club co-founder Lucas Oakeley reads from his debut novel Nearly Departed in this passage episode of Character Study. Lucas reads the chapter What Dreams May Come, in which grief-stricken Joel describes a recurring dream to his therapist: a woman on the opposite platform at a train station, both reading the same edition of Wuthering Heights, their eyes meeting across the tracks just as the trains pull in opposite directions. Then he wakes up and does it all over again. Freya and Lucas then talk about why he always tries to make his therapist laugh, what happens when they don't, and how he edits his drafts — removing three or four jokes per paragraph until the ones that remain land harder for the space around them. This is a conversation about grief, dreams and why you're allowed to be funny and sincere at the same time. 🎥 Watch on YouTube 🎥 Watch the full conversation 📘 Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley 📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for…

Lucas Oakeley is the author of Nearly Departed, a debut novel about a man navigating grief and love three years after losing someone close — a rom com that somehow manages to be genuinely funny. He's also the co-founder of Boys Book Club, a community built around the radical idea that men can just read books for pleasure, and a journalist whose bylines span Vogue, GQ, and Esquire. In this episode, he joins Freya to talk about the writer he always wanted to be versus the writer he actually is, and why those two things aren't always the same. They discuss what it means to write emotionally open fiction from a male perspective — and why an early agent told him nobody would want to read a rom com written by a man. Lucas talks about writing grief that's "fuzzy rather than sharp": the kind that happens three years on, when the emails still need answering and rent still needs paying. He and Freya also get into the strange intimacy of writing characters who are, essentially, all versions of yourself; what Boys Book…

Singer-songwriter Hope Tala answers listener questions in this Q&A episode of the podcast. Listeners ask Hope what she wouldn't change about the music industry, who her dream collaborator is — her answer is Kendrick Lamar, whose album To Pimp a Butterfly she wrote her university dissertation on — and how she navigates the pressure to post constantly on TikTok when she'd rather be writing. She also shares the message a stranger sent her ten years ago about a song she'd put on SoundCloud that made her realise making music might be her purpose — a message about grief, and a moment of peace — and why she still remembers it now. This is a conversation about what keeps a creative going — and why it's almost never the things you'd expect. 🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE 📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your…

Singer-songwriter Hope Tala reads from her debut album Hope Handwritten in this passage episode of Character Study. Hope reads the lyrics to A Story to Tell — a song she wrote on a sunny day in Los Angeles when the music wasn't coming and she felt completely stuck — and reflects on why writing has been a solace since she was a teenager, the quiet resistance of making things purely for yourself, and why creativity isn't something reserved for artists. She and Freya talk about half-finished diaries, the 13-year-old boy on a ferry with headphones and a notepad writing songs, and why somewhere along the way we start to feel embarrassed by the urge to make things. This is a conversation about what it means to have a story to tell — and why all of us do. 🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE 📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you…

Singer-songwriter Hope Tala, one of the most exciting voices in British R&B, whose debut album Hope Handwritten charts three and a half years of heartbreak, new love and coming of age. As if writing an acclaimed album wasn't enough, Hope is also in the process of writing a debut novel, Maelstrom which sold in a heated seven-way auction. She joins Freya for this week's episode of Character Study to talk about writing a coming-of-age album over three and a half years, what it feels like to watch strangers sing your most intimate songs back to you, and what happened when Hope took her album to her label and they told her it was only 60% there. They also talk about being a big feelers in a stiff-upper-lip culture, Hope's artistic journey and why openness has been the making of her, sending a song to your partner very early in a relationship to say this is how I feel, and what it means to release art into the world and let it stop being yours. This is a conversation about feeling things deeply — and why the best…

Stand-up comedian, writer and Peckham bookseller Ben Pope answers listener questions in this Q&A episode of the pod Listeners ask Ben whether inspiration comes in sparks or from hard work, how you know if your joke is original or just unconsciously borrowed from someone you admire, and what the best knock knock joke he's ever heard is. Ben reflects on the years he spent writing material that came out sounding entirely like Dylan Moran, why comedians freely give each other punchlines after gigs, and why sitting in a café with a notebook is genuinely the pleasure of his life. This is a conversation about creativity, originality, and why the thing that makes your work truly yours is simply that you wrote it — even if someone gave you the ending. 🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE 🎟️ Buy tickets to Ben's Book Club comedy show at the Fringe this year, or his WIP standup also in Edinburgh this summer 📘 OUT NOW Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work. 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions…

Comedian Ben Pope reads his mischievous short story, Tomato Mozzarella Salad. A recipe that is also, somehow, an entire relationship contained in a single dinner. The story begins as a set of instructions and ends as a meditation on love, choice and the specific friction of spending a life with someone. Ben and Freya discuss what it means to make the choice right rather than the right choice, why the arguments you have with a partner are often the same argument on repeat, and why the grass on the other side looks greener only because you haven't spent enough time standing in it. This is a conversation about commitment, and why the smell of basil might be all the answer you need. 🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE 🎟️ Buy tickets to Ben's Book Club comedy show at the Fringe this year, or his WIP standup also in Edinburgh this summer 📘 OUT NOW Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work. 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind…

Ben Pope is a comedian, bookseller and writer based in south London. He manages Review bookshop in Peckham, has been doing stand-up for over a decade, and has taken a string of critically acclaimed shows to the Edinburgh Fringe — most recently The Cut, a narrative show that begins with a very personal medical decision and opens out into something much bigger about grief, fathers, and what it actually means to look after yourself. In this conversation, Ben and Freya talk about what it's like to build a creative identity in public when your work resists easy categorisation, the difference between performing vulnerability on stage and exposing it on the page, and why comedy is one of the best coping mechanisms humans have — as long as you're honest about what it's actually doing. They get into the real economics of Edinburgh Fringe, why Ben didn't have a smartphone until 2020, and the strange experience of performing something deeply personal in front of strangers and having them come up afterwards and say: me…

Freya puts listener questions to actor and author Hannah Murray, whose memoir The Make-Believe is out now from Penguin. Hannah answers questions from listeners about her time on Skins — including the behind-the-scenes moment she'd most want to relive — and reflects on whether the qualities that made her a good actor, empathy and emotional availability chief among them, also made her more vulnerable to the experiences she writes about. She offers practical, hard-won advice for anyone attempting their own memoir: set strict time limits, move it off you physically, and don't rush — because no one else can tell your story the way you can. Plus, a poet friend's reframe of writing exhaustion that stopped both Hannah and Freya in their tracks. This is a conversation about what it costs to go back — and why the only cure for creative jet lag is getting outside. 🎥 WATCH the full episode here 📘 Buy Hannah Murray's The Make Believe and remember you can now pre-order Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work. 💛 Follow…

In this passage episode, Hannah reads from the opening chapter of her memoir The Make Believe. A scene from the set of the film Detroit, where she played a victim of sexual assault in one of the most physically and emotionally gruelling shoots of her career. Hannah describes having her dress ripped from her body, take after take, night after night, and the moment she realised that however much her mind knew it was pretend, her body didn't. Freya and Hannah then discuss the physical and emotional cost of playing dark material repeatedly, what it means to access your own trauma on screen, and what Hannah's experience on Detroit set in motion. 🎥 WATCH the full episode here 📘 Buy Hannah Murray's The Make Believe 📕 Pre-order Freya's debut novel: A Real Piece of Work 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy…

In this episode of Character Study, Freya sits down with Hannah Murray: actor, author and now writer, best known for playing Cassie in Skins and Gilly in Game of Thrones. Hannah's debut memoir The Make Believe explores fame, mental illness and the blurring of the line between magic and reality. They talk about what it means to build an identity around being chosen — as an actor, as a romantic partner, as a spiritual seeker — and what happens when that external validation disappears. Hannah opens up about her involvement in a wellness organisation that led to a psychiatric breakdown, the seductive appeal of magical thinking, and why writing her memoir felt like the most authentic creative act of her life. This is a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves, the gap between imagination and reality, and what it really means to make yourself up. 🎥 WATCH the full episode here: https://youtu.be/QODMs-gDC6g 📘 Buy Hannah Murray's The Make Believe and remember you can now pre-order Freya's novel: A Real Piece…

In this listener Q&A, Emma Gannon answers questions sent in by Character Study followers from around the world. On everything from how to get noticed as a new author, to beating writer's block, to whether nature really does help your creativity. WATCH the full episode HERE Buy Emma Gannon’s Creative Compass, A Year of Nothing and more. And remember you can now pre-order Freya’s novel: A Real Piece of Work. 👤 Follow @emmagannonuk on socials and Substack 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya’s newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this passage episode from our guest, Emma reads from her latest book Creative Compass — a story about watching a Bill Cunningham documentary in her early 20s and the creative philosophy it unlocked. Bill Cunningham, the beloved New York Times street photographer, lived in a rent-controlled room at Carnegie Hall, slept surrounded by filing cabinets, and ripped up a large cheque rather than compromise his freedom. The passage that follows is Emma's meditation on what that means for a creative life: keep your overheads low, consume less, create more. Freya and Emma then discuss the passage and where it sits in their own creative lives. WATCH the full episode HERE Buy Emma Gannon’s Creative Compass, A Year of Nothing and more. And remember you can now pre-order Freya’s novel: A Real Piece of Work. 👤 Follow @emmagannonuk on socials and Substack 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya’s newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️And hit…

In the first ever episode of Character Study, Freya sits down with Emma Gannon: author of nine books, Substack writer to 80,000 readers and one of the most distinctive voices on the internet about creative life. They talk about what it really means to build a career from creativity, the difference between performing as a creative person and actually being one, why Emma's burnout happened when she forgot to live and how stepping back from the "shiny" version of success led to her most honest work yet. Emma also talks about her new book Creative Compass—a cosy, permission-giving guide on how to return to your creative practice—and why she wanted it to feel less like a manual and more like a reminder that you're a writer and you can do this. This is a conversation about romanticising your creative life, protecting your time and energy and why the writing is always the best bit. WATCH the full episode here: https://youtu.be/m9hv0nQNGEo Buy Emma Gannon’s Creative Compass, A Year of Nothing and more. And remember…

Everyone plays a character. But what does it really mean to turn your life into art? In this new podcast series, Freya explores how writers, artists and performers shape their character. Each episode, she’ll be talking to creatives of every discipline about the delicate art of finding inspiration in the everyday. From memoir to standup via autofiction and Instagram, what happens when we blur the lines between fact and fiction? These conversations explore how seeing yourself as a ‘character’ in your own story can unearth unexpected courage, compassion and curiosity. And maybe even a bit more self-reflection. This podcast isn’t just for writers, it’s for anyone trying to make sense of their own story. Series 1 guests include Emma Gannon, Hope Tala, Hannah Murray, Will Harris, Sharlene Teo, Sarvat Hasin, Ben Pope, Lucas Oakeley and more 📲 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya’s newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️And hit…