Archive note: This interview was originally published by Litro USA as part of the Art & Technology issue. It has been added to Litro’s UK archive as part of our Art & Technology / AI & Publishing collection.

Archive note: This interview with Kate Pullinger was originally published by Litro USA in 2019 as part of our Art & Technology coverage. It has now been migrated into Litro’s UK archive as part of our developing Art & Technology / AI & Publishing collection.

The conversation remains useful because many of the questions it raises — digital literature, interactive storytelling, audio, voice interfaces, AI-assisted writing, reader engagement and the economics of authorship — have become more urgent, not less.

Kate Pullinger has long worked at the edge of literature and digital media. Her projects, including Breathe, Jellybone, Inanimate Alice and Letter to an Unknown Soldier, explore how fiction can move beyond the printed page without abandoning the force of prose.

In this interview, Pullinger discusses the promises and limits of digital publishing, the difficulty of sustaining experimental formats, the rise of audio, the role of collaboration, and the future of AI-assisted storytelling.

Read now, the interview feels less like a period piece and more like an early map of the questions publishers, writers and platforms are still trying to answer: how stories are made, how readers find them, who owns the tools, and what happens when literature enters responsive, personalised and algorithmic environments.

Interview with Kate Pullinger: Writing and the Digital Age

Litro: Your work, including Breathe, Jellybone, Inanimate Alice and Letter to an Unknown Soldier, has helped open up the space for writing through digital collaboration. How do you see the relationship between readers, authors and digital forms today?

Kate Pullinger: When I first embarked on digital collaborations, nearly 20 years ago, I thought that by now, 2019, the worlds of traditional publishing and digital media would have merged. That hasn’t happened. Behind the scenes, publishing is now a primarily digital process, with the printed book as an analogue outcome. But publishers and book readers haven’t shown much interest in text-based projects that are, for instance, interactive or responsive.

A combination of forces — ebooks, self-publishing, online book-buying and more — has brought about a golden age for readers. Books have never been more widely available or cheaper. Social media has made it easy for writers to interact directly with their readers, and vice versa. In many ways this has democratised publishing.

But the environment for writers is in fact very tough, with writers’ incomes falling dramatically over the past decade, and a tendency for books, fiction in particular, to either become bestselling and adapted for film and television, or to vanish within a matter of weeks. I have a new novel coming out next year, Forest Green, and it will be interesting to see how the landscape has changed around reader engagement since my last novel, Landing Gear, came out in 2014.

Litro: Newer forms of storytelling are emerging through podcasts, digital platforms and interactive models. Technology is influencing literature in revolutionary ways. Why are you interested in the meeting point between literature and digital media?

Kate Pullinger: For me there is a real joy in collaborating with technologists and other digital makers. When I first started working in this field I realised I’d never be a programmer, never be a web designer, and took the decision to stick to writing.

I find the way technology evolves rapidly fascinating, and I love the opportunities it creates for thinking about storytelling in new ways. We need to hold a space for literature in the context of emerging forms of technology that rely on storytelling. The rise of visual media shouldn’t mean that prose vanishes.

I think the current audio boom is opening up new ways to think about telling stories. I find it all very exciting, and it is a welcome contrast from the solitary work of writing a novel. These two modes of writing — collaborating on digital projects and the solitary labour of writing a novel — work together well.

Litro: Jellybone belongs to the genre of horror fiction. Could you tell us more about the story and the interactive format in which it was made available to readers?

Kate Pullinger: Jellybone was made in collaboration with a Berlin-based start-up called Oolipo. They were interested in using the affordances of the smartphone to tell stories, so Jellybone is a supernatural thriller that uses text combined with audio, video, notifications, gifs and photos to tell the story of a young woman called Florence Evans who can communicate with the dead through her phone.

However, Oolipo went bust about six weeks after Jellybone was launched. I think the Android version might still work, but not iOS. For me this is part of the risk and excitement of working with digital technologies: things break, things stop working, new things come along.

My ghost story for the smartphone, Breathe, was made with the Ambient Literature research project and Editions at Play, a collaboration between Google Creative Lab Sydney and Visual Editions.

This story is about the same character, Flo, and resides in the same storyworld. Breathe uses three APIs — application programming interfaces — to draw data relating to weather, time and location from the reader’s phone into the story. In other words, it personalises the story for every reader, but in a way that I hope is subtle and haunting. The ghosts in the story know where you are.

Litro: We increasingly see a tension between children’s attraction to technology and parents wanting them to develop a habit of reading. Traditional paperbacks seem to be losing favour with some younger readers. How do you think digital platforms are affecting traditional publishing?

Kate Pullinger: I do think this is an issue, although one that has more to do with content streaming than competition from digital literature. Why read a book when you can stream amazing, high-quality visual content?

Again, I think the audio boom is providing some interesting answers to this, attracting a vast array of listeners to podcasts, audiobooks and audio content, including people who do not think of themselves as readers, people who might never enter a bookshop.

I read a report the other day that predicts that by the end of next year, in the US, more than 50% of interactions with technology will be via voice. So audio feeds into the enormous potential of voice activation and voice interactivity.

Traditional publishing hasn’t been very interested in digital innovation when it comes to content. Their experiments haven’t proved as successful or durable as the book itself. But audio might change that.

Litro: As Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, what advice would you give to aspiring writers who want to create something distinctive using new forms? What kind of audience should they be thinking about?

Kate Pullinger: I think a key trait for any writer interested in emerging technology has to be a desire to collaborate. People who can write as well as programme and design are few and far between.

There is a lot we can learn from immersive theatre. Theatre practitioners have an innate understanding of embodiment, of bodies in space, which is very useful for thinking about storytelling in virtual spaces, such as VR and AR.

Immersive theatre audiences can be very diverse. Once you take theatre out of theatres, you open up to new kinds of audiences, and we can all learn a lot from that.

Litro: Where do you see technology taking literature in the next 30 years?

Kate Pullinger: Carving out a space for literature in the new technologies is key. Our research project Ambient Literature made some headway with that, and we’ll be continuing that research over the next couple of years.

I think 5G is going to provide opportunities for local, location-specific innovation around form and content. But who knows where we’ll be in 30 years’ time in terms of reading and writing.

Litro: Writing styles have evolved over the years. From epistolary novels we have moved to novels that demonstrate the culture of texting. How has technology contributed to the evolution of writing styles?

Kate Pullinger: This question is too huge to answer. Though I think the mini-trend in experimental use of fonts and typography in print books, like Max Porter’s Lanny and David Almond’s A Song for Ella Grey, has arisen because we’ve become accustomed to text that morphs and changes on screens. Sally Rooney’s elegant novels make great use of the multiple ways we communicate with each other these days.

Litro: Your projects often involve collaboration between you as a writer and web designers, interface developers or other digital makers. What are some of the challenges you face when working on these projects?

Kate Pullinger: Sometimes collaborators speak different languages. I don’t mean literally, as in not English, but I do mean literally in the sense that the word “prototype” seems to mean different things in different sectors.

Defining roles can be difficult, and deciding on shared outcomes can also be difficult. Authorial voice remains important to me, so I’ve tended to work on projects where I’m the lead writer. There are exceptions, mainly large participatory projects like Letter to an Unknown Soldier, which had 22,000 writers.

Litro: How do you negotiate or overcome these challenges?

Kate Pullinger: Talking, talking some more, iterating, talking more.

Litro: What are your future plans for engaging with electronic literature?

Kate Pullinger: I guess I prefer the term “experiential storytelling” these days, or even “digital fiction” or “ambient literature”. My plan is to work with a company that has created an artificial intelligence-aided storytelling platform. I’m intrigued by the potential of AI in storytelling.

Related Stories from the Art & Technology Archive

Continue through Litro’s archive on digital literature, algorithmic art, immersive media and the future of publishing.

• Art and Algorithms: The Work of Manfred Mohr
  Charlotte Kent examines algorithmic art, computer-based practice and the long history of artists working with systems and code.
• Interview with Multidisciplinary Artist Nwando Ebizie
  An interview on immersive performance, neurological perception, art, sound, holograms and the body as a site of technological experience.
• Art & Technology: Spring 2020 Editor’s Letter
  The editor’s letter introducing Litro’s Art & Technology issue and its wider questions about creativity, tools and publishing futures.
• Litro Winter–Spring 2020: Art & Technology
  The full issue bringing together fiction, essays, interviews and visual culture on technology’s role in creative life.

Eric Akoto

Eric Akoto is the founder of Litro Magazine (est. 2005), Litro USA, and The Sphere Initiative. Working at the intersection of publishing, culture, standards, and technology, he builds editorial platforms and practical tools that help creators protect, publish, and sustain their work. He also serves on British Standards Institution committees shaping standards relevant to digital, creative, and emerging technology contexts.