Ryan Murdock

1 week ago | personallandscapespodcast.com | Ryan Murdock

Germany’s post-war recovery was an economic miracle. It didn’t just put the nightmare Nazi years behind it. The modern country rose from the ruins with astonishing speed, rebuilding shattered cities and transforming companies like Mercedes-Benz, Bayer and Siemens into titans. Germany was on the rise in a good way. And then it all started going wrong.

3 weeks ago | personallandscapespodcast.com | Ryan Murdock

Digital platforms promised us personalization but their algorithms homogenized culture to a bland lowest common denominator instead. They don’t just influence what we consume, they also determine what is produced as artists shape their output to fit what gets seen and what gets shared. Ever wonder why trendy cafes all look the same no matter what city you visit? Are you tired of the relentless sameness that has cursed books, art, music and film since the early 2010’s?

1 month ago | ryanmurdock.com | Ryan Murdock

I have given up on Canada. We’re leaving Berlin next year for Japan, and I’ve accepted that it’s probably permanent. I never gave my future much conscious thought. I went abroad for curiosity — to see the world beyond the 4,500 person town I grew up in — and to find my subject as a writer. If I thought about it at all, I guess I thought of myself as an expat. Someone living outside their native country — ex patria — for my work. I’ve lived in 16 different apartments in 8 cities and 4 countries.

2 months ago | ryanmurdock.com | Ryan Murdock

Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she’d never met. It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why. She pieced the story together from forgotten anecdotes, dim memories and institutional archives spanning four generations of her own family, and the history of Ireland from the 1890s to the 1980s.

2 months ago | ryanmurdock.com | Ryan Murdock

What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel. The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the British Embassy in Moscow. It’s an exciting high stakes thriller with insightful social commentary and a vivid sense of place.