Jul 2, 2026 · 40 min · 13 segments
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…
Sarvat HasinGuest
Freya BromleyHost
it's great to see you on video and it feels a little bit like going back to our workshops because we're friends uh but we kind of got to know each other through being in a writing workshop group and i was just interested what you think a writing workshop gives your creative practice that you can't get from writing on your own.
How long have we been doing our workshop? Has it been like a year and a bit or even longer than that? It must be.
I sort of came to it at a really interesting point in my sort of writing process because I was working on Strange Girls at the time.
Because I've been in other writing workshops before and I did a creative writing degree.
For whatever reason, I was having a really hard time with this book and not really sharing it.
And I remembered how much easier it is to fix things when you talk to other people about it.
For me, it's really different from almost this traditional idea of a writer, someone who... goes away to the mountains and writes a book on their own and is everything is just their own genius and something that comes out as this perfectly formed thing that's never been the case for me and I feel like everybody has such different ways of writing I think what's incredible about our workshop is that we're four writers who write in very different styles and All sort of like broadly, I would say like literary fiction, but the styles are very different and the stories are very different.
And having access to sort of three brains other than my own is such a fantastic resource and such a great way to test ideas.
And in trying to fix Strange Girls by myself, I feel like I'd completely lost sight of what a reader's experience of the book would be.
And that's what was making me second guess it so much and making me so nervous in the process of writing it is that I'd lost complete contact with how anyone else was going to experience it.
And I feel like in our workshop there's this amazing thing where we get to read each other's work and I get a sort of early insight in what other people are getting from it and it's really invaluable.
it's great to see you on video and it feels a little bit like going back to our workshops because we're friends uh but we kind of got to know each other through being in a writing workshop group and i was just interested what you think a writing workshop gives your creative practice that you can't get from writing on your own.
How long have we been doing our workshop? Has it been like a year and a bit or even longer than that? It must be.
I sort of came to it at a really interesting point in my sort of writing process because I was working on Strange Girls at the time.
Because I've been in other writing workshops before and I did a creative writing degree.
For whatever reason, I was having a really hard time with this book and not really sharing it.
And I remembered how much easier it is to fix things when you talk to other people about it.
For me, it's really different from almost this traditional idea of a writer, someone who... goes away to the mountains and writes a book on their own and is everything is just their own genius and something that comes out as this perfectly formed thing that's never been the case for me and I feel like everybody has such different ways of writing I think what's incredible about our workshop is that we're four writers who write in very different styles and All sort of like broadly, I would say like literary fiction, but the styles are very different and the stories are very different.
And having access to sort of three brains other than my own is such a fantastic resource and such a great way to test ideas.
And in trying to fix Strange Girls by myself, I feel like I'd completely lost sight of what a reader's experience of the book would be.
And that's what was making me second guess it so much and making me so nervous in the process of writing it is that I'd lost complete contact with how anyone else was going to experience it.
And I feel like in our workshop there's this amazing thing where we get to read each other's work and I get a sort of early insight in what other people are getting from it and it's really invaluable.
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