We speak to Sally Page, best-selling author, about her new novel Six Little Words. Six Little Words follows two strangers embarking together on a Shakespeare-inspired scavenger hunt only to learn that you’re never too old to find love or pursue your dreams.

We discuss mid-life romance, friendship, exploring your creativity, writing the male voice, lies, synaesthesia, painting and more.

Blackstone Publishing is the US publisher and the publication is 24 Feb 2026.

HarperCollins is the UK publisher and the publication day is 12 March 2026.

About Sally Page:

Sally Page is the internationally bestselling author of The Keeper of Stories, The Book of Beginnings, and The Secret of Flowers. After studying history at university, Sally moved to London to work in advertising. In her spare time, she studied floristry, eventually opening up her own flower shop, an experience that offered a unique window into people’s lives that has inspired her writing. She has two daughters, bestselling author Libby Page and Alex, a doctor. She lives in Dorset.

This episode was produced by Martin Nathan.

Martin Nathan has worked as a labourer, showman, pancake chef, fire technician, and a railway engineer. His short fiction has been published by Tangent Press, HCE and Grist and his poetry has appeared in Finished Creatures, Erbacce and Aesthetica. His novel – A Place of Safety is published by Salt Publishing.

Long hidden in an attic, vivid and revelatory poems shine a new light on the life and loves of Iris Murdoch.

In the dusty attic of Iris Murdoch’s Oxford home lay a battered, black chest. In 2016, when the chest was finally opened, Murdoch’s life in poems was revealed.

Renowned for her fiercely intelligent novels and groundbreaking philosophy, Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Yet she is also known for her equally radical life – intense friendships, relationships with both men and women, and an open marriage – about which much has, often controversially, been written. Now, her tightly wrought and vivid poems reveal a new, deeply personal account in Murdoch’s own voice. They range over the preoccupations closest to her heart, from the state of Ireland to memories of a first love lost in the Second World War.

We speak to Dr Miles Leeson, one of the editors of Poems from an Attic by Iris Murdoch, to learn more about this exciting discovery and how it adds to our understanding of the work of the famous philosopher and novelist.

Dr Leeson also reads three poems from the book, 'Reverie in Winchester Cathedral', 'I find that honesty is a hard thing', and 'Macaw in the Snow'.

Dr Miles Leeson is Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester and Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University. He is Lead Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, Series Editor of Iris Murdoch Today with Palgrave Macmillan, host of the Iris Murdoch Podcast, and has published widely on Murdoch’s work.

He published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, the edited collection Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018), the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), the co-edited collections Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination (2022) and Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (2025), co-edited her selected poetry Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995 (2025), and is currently writing Visiting Mrs Bayley and Other Essays (2026) Iris Murdoch and Feminism and editing The Oxford Handbook of Iris Murdoch (2028).

You can find out more about him and his work here:

https://www.chi.ac.uk/people/miles-leeson/

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. After working in the Treasury and in the UN, she discovered philosophy, eventually becoming Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. Her philosophical concerns are at the heart of the 25 novels for which she became famous, gaining the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She wrote poetry all her life.

The Iris Murdoch Society

Buy the book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/470920/poems-from-an-attic-by-murdoch-iris/9781784746124

Music: “The Silver Swan” (O. Gibbons), performed by Denis Carpenter, Clara IMSLP (CC BY 3.0): https://clara.imslp.org/work/51148 —

Story Radio interviews Mathew Gostelow, the editor of Silent Screams: An Anthology of Quiet Horror, about trends in the horror genre, the meaning of 'quiet horror', the child's perspective in horror writing, contemporary vs historical fiction and many other topics such as Twin Peaks and Frankenstein.

We listen to a reading of 'Barnabas Calstock's Last Wish' by the author Terry Holland (Trigger warning: this story contains references to war and violence that some listeners may find disturbing).

About Mathew Gostelow

Mathew Gostelow haunts a leafy suburb of Birmingham, UK. His CV is a chaotic patchwork quilt, including journalism, pheasant farming, catering, and marketing. Mat’s taste in art, music, film, and literature is equally eclectic, although he tends to gravitate towards anything with a creepy, dreamy aesthetic.

If you catch him staring intently into the middle distance, Mat is either thinking about Twin Peaks or cooked breakfasts.

Some days he wakes early and scribbles strange tales.

Mat has written several books, including two speculative short story collections entitled An Ill-Stitched Menagerie and See My Breath Dance Ghostly, and a novella-in-flash; Dantalion is a Quiet Place. Mat has also co-written a horror-thriller novella called Watcher with his friend JP Relph, and edited an anthology of quiet horror short stories, titled Silent Screams.

He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction.

You can find Mat on Twitter: @MatGost, and BlueSky: @MatGost.

Website: https://weirding-words.blogspot.com/p/about.html

Substack: https://matgost.substack.com/

About Terry Holland

Terry Holland grew up in Essex, England, before studying in London and Berlin. He has dabbled in the theatre, music, journalism, translation and the occult and currently lives in the Netherlands with his black cat, Mackem, who is a reincarnation of a wise woman and herbalist known as Black Meg, persecuted as a witch in the northeast of England in the seventeenth century. He writes flash and short stories and will never, ever write a novel.

He bleats his Wordle scores @terryholland.bsky.social

The Producer was Martin Nathan.

Martin Nathan has worked as a labourer, showman, pancake chef, fire technician, and a railway engineer. His short fiction has been published by Tangent Press, HCE and Grist and his poetry has appeared in Finished Creatures, Erbacce and Aesthetica. His novel – A Place of Safety is published by Salt Publishing.

Cover image by...