👋 This post continues a series of interviews with authors. You can read the most recent, an interview with Elaine Garvey, here. Seth Insua is the author of the BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick, Human, Animal (2025, Verve). His comics have been serialized in magazines; his literary fiction shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and The London Magazine’s Short Story Competition.
Human, Animal is an ambitious novel following dairy farmer George Calvert as he fights to keep the family business afloat amid his mother’s ailing health and troubled relationship with his youngest son, Tom. When animal rights activists break into the cowshed one morning and Tom appears to side with the protestors, father and son lock horns, and the family threatens to unravel. It is available at most booksellers.
Our interview was, as always, conducted over e-mail and then edited for flow.
I knew from the beginning that the novel’s shape would emerge through contrast: distinct voices and registers, different moral perspectives, and emotional textures I couldn’t contain in a single narrator.
Seth,
Thank you for agreeing to the interview. I just loved Human, Animal and it's a genuine treat to be able to get into it with you.
Some of my favorite books are told from multiple perspectives, leveraging their polyphony to create a patchwork filled by negative space. When one character stops, another starts, so as a reader we see the entire picture colored by nuance and bias. Some of my least favorite books are also polyphonic, failing because the voices meld or every perspective shift replays the same events without enough differentiation to be interesting.
What I'm getting at is, novels with multiple perspectives are hard! What gave you the confidence to tackle a novel that spans not only multiple voices but voices that change distinctively over the course of the novel (and one—no spoilers—which is tremendously different from the others)? What was the germ of an idea that grew into this novel and did you always know polyphony would be at its heart?
You and I both published debut novels which are, at their hearts, family stories that form backbones from dense philosophical grapplings of real moral questions: Jewish identity in my case; ethical farming in yours. It's worth noting we were published by the same publisher, Verve Books, and shared an editor as well, the indomitable Jenna Gordon. While my life greatly influenced Placeholders, it was mostly superficial: I found it easier to lift specific jewelry someone wears in real life as a shorthand for an aesthetic, even when the full character was not intended to represent that person as a whole. Human, Animal is full of such rich experiential detail that I feel obligated to ask: how much of this novel was informed by personal experience?
James
James,
I really like your framing of polyphony as both risk and reward. For me, it was less about confidence and more about necessity. While Human, Animal dates back to 2016, my first proper notes on it are from 2019, and begin:
Represent both sides of a polarised debate in terms of sociological factors, e.g. isolated, dense agricultural networks/remote family business – reinforcements of tradition, cultural ritual, resistance to change from the outside – versus globalised, connected progressives whose ideologies are reflected back in online echo chambers.
I knew from the beginning that the novel’s shape would emerge through contrast: distinct voices and registers, different moral perspectives, and emotional textures I couldn’t contain in a single narrator.
The hope was that, taken together, the pieces might create something fuller than any one voice could on its own, though I was obviously nervous that the perspectives would collapse in on one another. I wrote Tam to be deeply introspective and sometimes defensive to the point of pretension. George is a sensitive soul but repressed, his thoughts and feelings punching their way out of him in brusque, clipped sentences. Their narratives are subjective and immediate, where Stefan’s journal is the literary creation of a man aware that his writing might be intercepted, torn between the impulse to process and record his experiences authentically, and the instinct to shape his story through artifice, euphemism and omission.
As for the personal: yes, definitely, though perhaps more thematically than biographically. Like you, I found myself using a family story to work through deeper questions – in my case, about inheritance, identity and conflict resolution, as well as responsibility, complicity, and what we’re willing to look away from in the name of love or survival. Having Jenna at the helm was super reassuring. She completely understood what I was trying to do with my book, and has a way of getting to the emotional core of a story without ever asking it to be simpler than it is. I felt very lucky to have her guidance – and to share that publishing path with you and others who are also trying to write with moral seriousness, without (hopefully) being moralistic.
Seth
Seth,
I love how you've phrased this. Something I struggled with while writing Placeholders is that I, like you, was using two sides to an ideological conflict to better flesh characters and pronounce tensions while avoiding polemic but I had to recognize my own biases and that I of course had strong opinions of my own. At multiple times during the edit, I had to scale back "my" side of things for the benefit of balance. Did you ever find yourself needing to temper your own leanings in order to give the "opposing" viewpoint more weight?
Finally, after having had the pleasure of reading the novel, a question I can't help but ask: are you a vegan?
James
James,
Writing Human, Animal, I tried to resist the temptation to press harder on the points I personally agreed with, or to frame certain arguments more sympathetically than others. The novel is supposed to feel honest. It's not about trying to "win" the debate, but focuses instead on the characters' internal logic: what makes their beliefs feel necessary or inevitable to them. That goal helped me write with more curiosity and (hopefully) less agenda. It’s still a partial lens, of course – I don’t think true neutrality is possible, or even desirable – but I tried to create space for dissonance, and for the reader to form their own judgments.
I was really inspired by my research, for instance debates I'd watched where I felt sympathy for both sides. A fun example is the TV debate between vegan activist/former Made in Chelsea star Lucy Watson and family farmer Mat Carter, who's cornered into confessing on live TV that to slaughter his turkeys "humanely" (his word) he "slits their throats". It's riveting stuff.
You might recognise some similarities between this interview and the TV interview scene in Human, Animal!
And, sure, you can ask if I’m a vegan, but I’m going to let you down by sidestepping the question! I don’t think I’m very interesting, and my beliefs and opinions don’t matter much. I’ve spent so much time researching the ethical arguments around farming and animal rights, and yet I still don’t feel qualified to make pronouncements about them. But ethical contradictions fascinate me, especially those we interact with daily, and I hope there’s power in leaving them unresolved – in telling a story about characters with irreconcilable views and identities, who still find a way to come together.
Seth
I had the pleasure of meeting Seth for the first time in London during a showcase for Verve’s upcoming catalogue. It’s a pleasure not only to read about the book he was finishing at the time, but to see how well it’s done, and get to ask him about it.
You can find more information about Seth, including his work and contact information, here.
-JSR
Loved this!