Where The Wildelings Are. Writer Lisa Harding on surviving Trinity College, anxiety and the Male Gaze

Lisa Harding’s stunning new book The Wildelings is set in a fictional university in Dublin. 

On Free State today, Lisa talks to us about her own time at Trinity in the 90s, when students would be rated on their looks. She talks to Dion about the male gaze and their shared experiences of drink and how when she became an actress she turned to tequila to take the edge off her anxiety.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Free State is a podcast for the curious that stimulates, provokes, challenges and entertains, while never taking itself too seriously. Free State covers topics from sport to politics, love to loss, the human condition and how to fix the world, with guests from across the planet including Nigerian princes, former Prime Ministers, ex convicts, footballers, boxers and extraordinary people from every walk of life. 

Free State is presented by Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning. Brolly is a barrister, an original thinker with a fascinating backstory, who donated a kidney to a stranger and then led a crusade to transform organ donation on the island of Ireland, and Fanning is an award-winning interviewer and author. 

They are not motivational gurus or life coaches. They will never try to sell you a penis scented candle. They are two people from very different worlds, with one core belief uniting them - this is not a high performance podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• No. of episodes: 229
• Latest episode: 2025-05-13
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