There's one detail that everyone's picked up on in Claire Kohda's debut novel: the fact that the main character, Lydia, is a vampire. But it's actually much more about food than it is about vampires.

Claire explores how the book relates to ethnic identity and colonialism, and the othering of Asian cultures which happens so frequently, and explains how food came to be such a central part of a story whose main character physically can't eat it.

Woman, Eating is published by Virago.

Claire Kohda is a writer and musician; she reviews books for the TLS and her writing was also recently included in the anthology East Side Voices.


Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove

Ben MacDonald creates original illustrations for every episode of Lecker.

Lecker is on Twitter, Instagram and now TikTok.



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Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

You can access the transcript for this episode via Audioboom, or at leckerpodcast.com.