EP #79 - Fiction in the Pandemic - Daniel Jose Older and Malka Older

Today, we have a discussion of fiction and writing in the COVID-19 pandemic with Malka Older and Malka’s brother Daniel Jose Older.

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the Middle Grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, Star Wars: Last Shot, The Book of Lost Saints, and the award winning Young Adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature,the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person ShouldRead. He is a lead story architect on the Star Wars: The High Republic cross platform initiative. You can find out more at http://danieljoseolder.net/

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and academic. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development.Her research interests include intra-governmental relations in crises; the paradox of well-funded disaster responses;measurement and evaluation of disaster responses; and the effects of competition among actors in humanitarian aid. Malka Older’s science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She is also the author of the sequels, Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018). Her short story and poetry collection And Other Disasters was released in late 2019.