In this week's podcast we talk to two debut writers longlisted for the Guardian first book award who have taken grief as a starting point, and let it carry them to stunningly original

places. Katharine Norbury's The Fish Ladder is an account of her travels through the Scottish, English and Welsh countryside which she embarked upon with her small daughter after

suffering a miscarriage. Max Porter's Grief is a Thing with Feathers has been described as "a freewheeling hybrid of novella, poem, essay and play-for-voices". It follows a

father and his two small sons through the months following the death of their wife and mother. The writers join us in the studio to explain how they found a form for their stories and to