Amabookabooka: The Quarantine Chronicles - Lauren Beukes

Amabookabooka, the literary podcast produced by Jonathan Ancer and Dan Dewes, travels into the heart of the lockdown to bring you quick and quirky interviews with SA's finest authors via everyone's favourite isolation mode of communication, Zoom.

Lauren Beukes crisscrosses literary genres to write ground-breaking weird-and-wonderful dystopian thrillers. Her novels - Moxyland, Zoo City, The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters - are beautifully written, with complex characters and intriguing pulse-racing plots and plots within plots that are skillfully knitted together.

Lauren also writes comics and screen plays, directed the documentary Glitterboys & Ganglands, and wrote the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom. Academics study her work, fans name their pets and children after her characters and she has won prestigious literary honours. She has received endorsements from Stephen King, shout outs from George RR Martin and big-ups from Neil Gaiman.

Lauren is the Trevor Noah of the literary horror-sci-fi-spec-fic-cyberpunk-fantasy- psych-thriller-dystopian world. And now Afterland, her spanking new novel about a global pandemic has come out slap-bang in the middle of a global pandemic.