Forget The Odyssey. These authors have their own mythical retellings — with Yann Martel, Nikita Gill and Zoe Terakes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
In the course of my travels, I've been recording nature soundscapes, with the aim of helping you, Australia, to relax. And in this particular overnight recording, there was this one duck that just kept screaming its guts out.
Anyway, don't worry, I've selected only the best, most relaxing soundscapes but absolutely do not feature this duck. Find Nature Sounds by Anne Jones, wherever you get your podcasts and on the ABC Listen app.

**Natasha Mitchell** (0:37)
From love?

**Nikita Gill** (0:38)
For her, she says that in many ways, mortals are so much luckier than gods because everything they experience is at a heightened point. Their joys, their griefs, you know, and the depths of their loves are so much deeper than what we can ever have.

**Natasha Mitchell** (0:55)
To sex.

**Zoe Terakes** (0:56)
My dad says this thing where he says Greeks invented sex and Romans invented it with women. Which I think is true.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:05)
To death.

**Yann Martel** (1:06)
Some of us may be fools so we'll never meet Athena.
You know, some may not have a great love life so we're not going to see much of Aphrodite. But for sure we're all going to meet Hades. And yet he's notably un-worshipped.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:19)
Greek mythology has it all and more. Gods, goddesses, heroes, monsters, quests and odysseys. Plenty of violence. And as Christopher Nolan's box office smash retelling of the Greek epic, The Odyssey suggests, these stories will never die, but they might be retold. And today on Big Ideas, three superstar writers with their own mythical retellings.
With Big Thinkers at the best live events on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen, I'm Natasha Mitchell. Welcome. And at the Melbourne Writers Festival, we're joined by Booker Prize winning author of The Life of Pi, Yann Martel, whose new book, Son of Nobody, is a contemporary reimagining of Homer's The Iliad, which happens to be the prequel to The Odyssey and The Trojan War Trilogy.
The Irish-Cashmiri bestselling poet, playwright, actor and popular Instagrammer Nikita Gill's latest book, Hekate, The Witch, is described as a fiercely feminist reimagining of an enigmatic Greek goddess. And the non-binary trans-Sypriot Australian writer and actor, Zoe Terakes' first book, Eros, is a collection of Greek myths retold through a queer lens, and they're joined today by host, editor of the Australian Literary Journal, Griffith Review, Carody Culver.

**Carody Culver** (2:55)
The ancient myths have such a stronghold over our imaginations, and they pass universal themes of belonging, love, and grief as well.
So, Yann, I am starting with you. Your novel, Son of Nobody, is a beautifully poignant and it's a very structurally inventive story within a story. It's about a Canadian classic scholar called Harlow Don. And during a scholarship year at Oxford University, he is meant to be translating various very dry bureaucratic parchments from ancient Greek. He discovers these fragments of an epic poem that offers a different account of the Trojan War. It's one that centres on a common soldier.
Now, the Iliad, which is the most famous account of that war, looms large in this book, as we heard from my next question for Yann, spoiler alert. Tell us about your first encounter with the Iliad, and how that led you to imagine a new way of telling that story.

**Yann Martel** (3:56)
Well, I came to the Iliad quite late. I grew up on the Greek myths, reading retellings of them. Roger Lancelin Green, Edith Hamilton, Robert Graves.
I always read the retellings, but I never actually read original material until just a few years ago when my partner suggested that I... Because I was between books, she said, why don't you read this great new translation?
Not quite so new now, but it was just a few years ago by an American poet named Stephen Mitchell. And it's a very lean translation. He's cut away any excess that has been added over the ages, and he's also pared away stuff that is endlessly repetitive in the original. All those epithets, these repeated modifiers, Swift running, horse taming, wine dark, all these things that are incessantly repeated, he cut out. Anyway, it's a very lean, propulsive translation of the Iliad. So I read it, and it wasn't what I expected. And lots of books you read aren't what you expected, but what's nice about myth, and I think it's central to what we'll be talking about today, what's nice about myths is that they're endlessly plastic, elastic. There's no accountability to anything, so they invite you to play with them. You know, you can't play quite so much with history, or if you do, you're doing it a very knowing where, where people will say, this is what really happened, and this is how you're playing with it. So there's still, you know, the retelling of a historical event is still tethered to what we know happened. Whereas with myth, it's not the case at all. You can really do what you want, and it makes it, therefore, you can personalize it a lot. So that's what happened with me with reading the Iliad there. I saw elements there that I had not expected. So for example, everyone in the Iliad who speaks is a blue blood of one sort or another, either a god or a king or a queen. And only one commoner speaks, only one.