Naomi Alderman, author of the bestselling novel The Power, is just getting over Covid and feeling a bit wiped out. “But don’t worry, I still seem able to talk for England,” she says cheerfully from her home in north London, when we meet to talk about her new novel The Future. “I figured I might as well let people know that I’m an ambitious writer,” she jokes of her punchy titles. Our conversation ranges from the Old Testament (“I like Genesis much more than I like Leviticus”) to QAnon (“a new religious belief”) and AI, as well as private griefs and the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East.
The 49-year-old describes herself as a “games writer turned novelist”: she co-created the Zombies, Run! app, which has 10 million users, “to make exercise a bit less bloody boring”. Just as she aims to keep people running, so she writes to keep people reading, taking the pacy, wildly inventive possibilities of gaming into her novels. Whereas Iris Murdoch used to write fiction in the mornings and philosophy in the afternoons, Alderman does books in the mornings and games after lunch – and she’s currently doing an Open University MA in classical studies, for good measure. “My trouble is I’m interested in everything.”
