Podcast with Marga Ortigas, author of “God’s Ashes: Apocrypha”

Marga Ortigas Marga Ortigas

Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media. These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes, a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination.

 

 

God’s Ashes: Apocrypha, Marga Ortigas (Penguin Southeast Asia, June 2024)
God’s Ashes: Apocrypha, Marga Ortigas (Penguin Southeast Asia, June 2024)

In this interview, Marga and I talk about what inspired her book and its major themes, and whether being a journalist helped her with her worldbuilding and weaving the threads of her novel together.

Marga Ortigas has traveled the world as a journalist for three decades, with a career spanning five continents and two of the largest global news networks. After getting her start in the Philippines, she joined CNN in London, working across Europe and covering the war in Iraq from its inception. In 2006, she returned to Manila and the Asia Pacific region, reporting from the front-lines of armed conflict and climate change as senior correspondent for Al Jazeera.

She is the editor of I, Migrant, an online platform which showcases writing from the diaspora, advocating a universal humanity beneath people’s differences.


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.