Guest author: David Quantick

I'm delighted to welcome guest author David Quantick to Listen with Other.

In series 10, David reads 'The Princess and the Golem', an extract from his delightful and surprising new novel The Hyena, published by Stars and Sabers on 10th November 2026.

David writes:

It is the extraordinary story of an extraordinary artist called Deborah Parkinson and her adventures in the 210th century. Along the way, she meets everyone from Frida Kahlo to Leon Trotsky, experiences Paris in the 1930s, New York in the 60s, Plymouth in the Blitz and Mexico City in the 1940s.
 
It’s a story about art, women, and identity. Why are women always labelled as muses while men get all the credit? How do you survive on talent alone? And what if someone was the greatest artist you’d never heard of?
 
THE HYENA is the story of Deborah Parkinson. She was a surrealist who grew up in pre-WW2 Plymouth where her dad ran a pub, then she ran away to Paris where she met Dali and Picasso and Frida Kahlo, and fell in love with a mysterious artist called Marius.
 
When war came, she followed Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington to Mexico, where she hung out with Kahlo again, and met Leon Trotsky. Implicated in Trotsky’s murder, she fled back to Plymouth in the Blitz.
 
In her later years, she settles down with her young family, resolves some issues in New York, and nearly died in an old people’s home.  Nearly.
 
You probably haven’t heard of her because I made her up. She’s entirely fictional. I wanted to write a book about a surrealist because I love surrealism. I wanted to write about a female surrealist because I love female surrealists – Leonora Carrington (whose hyenas I stole), Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning – but those women came from well-off families and they had support networks.  They could dance naked on tables in Paris and get away with it. I wanted a character who didn’t dance on tables – in fact, had to clean those tables to earn a crust. How does a poor female artist survive in a world of rich men?
 
I wanted Deborah Parkinson to be the greatest artist you’ve never heard of.

David Quantick is an Emmy Award-winning television writer, an author, movie writer, and radio broadcaster. As well as writing on Veep, The Thick of It and Harry Hill’s TV Burp, David also wrote the critically-acclaimed TV drama Snodgrass, the romantic comedy movie Book Of Love, and the award-winning Whatever Happened To Baby Jane Austen?, a Radio 4 sitcom for French and Saunders. 

You can listen to David read his story extract as series 10 of Listen with Other on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, other podcast providers and on this website.