In today’s episode, we talked to the BBC journalist and prolific novelist Hamid Ismailov. Hamid has a fascinating day job – Editor of the Central Asia service at the BBC World Service – but he still makes time in evenings several months a year to write novels. He shared with us his system for averaging one novel for year, but still having time to daydream about your next project(s), and why he doesn’t want to quit his day job.

Hamid is the author of numerous books in Russian and Uzbek, which have been translated into English and many other languages. His most recent book is The Devils’ Dance. One of his first books to receive widespread acclaim in English is The Railway, which has an untraditional, folkloric structure and many fantastic characters. Since then, in English he has published several books, including The Dead Lake, about the area of Kazakhstan where nuclear testing had occurred previously, an elegy about Moscow called The Underground, and A Poet and Bin Laden, and many more books and artistic projects that have not been tranlsated. He was formerly the BBC’s Writer in Residence, and during that time he wrote many lovely blog posts.

We enjoyed talking to him, and we think you’ll learn from and be inspired by our discussion with him this week.

Full show notes are here.