The Trump administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical of Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka revealed on Tuesday.

“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.

Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.

Soyinka speculated that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reassess his visa, which he said he would not attend.

According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, seen by Agence France-Presse, officials have cancelled his visa, citing US state department regulations that allow “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.

Reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre, he jokingly called it a “rather curious love letter from an embassy”, while telling any organisations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.

“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka said.

The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.

The Trump administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably targeting university students who were outspoken about Palestinian rights.

Soyinka said he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said Trump “should be proud of”.

“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”

The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honours from top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.

His latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka described the book as his “gift to Nigeria” in an interiview with the Guardian.

In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.

Soyinka left the door open to accepting an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

He went on to criticise the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”

Trump’s crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.

A Bosnian actor who was deported from Serbia this week has said he believes he was expelled for writing openly about his experience in the war in the 1990s and that “there is no such thing” as freedom of expression under the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić.

Serbian authorities detained Fedja Stukan after he arrived at a Belgrade airport to attend a literary festival and put him on a flight to Sarajevo on Monday.

Stukan – an activist, author and actor known for his role in Angelina Jolie’s 2011 film In the Land of Blood and Honey, about the war in Bosnia – told the Guardian the Serbian authorities had designated him a “national security risk”. But, he said, the real reason for his deportation was his blunt writing.

“I wrote a very dangerous book,” he said in a phone interview on Monday evening. “I quit heroin, alcohol and everything, and I became a pilot and father and movie producer and actor, and I wrote a book about my life. I was a sniper in a war. I was in special combat in a war. So I know things, I know how they were done during the war,” he said.

“I told everything about everyone, and all of those nationalists just, you know, hate me so much because they know that I touched them in the right place,.”

Stukan’s autobiography, Blank, describes his journey from the frontlines of the war in Bosnia to political activism and Hollywood film-making. More than 100,000 people were killed in the 1992-95 war, with Serb forces tried and convicted of committing war crimes. The conflict remains a sensitive issue in the region.

On Monday, Stukan, who has previously participated in anti-government protests in Belgrade, also took aim at Serbia’s leadership, arguing that the country’s president allows some opposition voices to maintain a veneer of democracy.

“There is no such thing,” he said, when asked about freedom of speech and expression in Serbia.

Watchdogs and opposition groups have long raised concerns about the state of democracy in Serbia.

In a recent report, Freedom House thinktank pointed to “unfair electoral conditions and numerous irregularities” in the elections in December and “an increasingly hostile environment for critical journalism”.

Vučić’s office did not respond to a request for comment. He has previously described Stukan as a “criminal”.

Stukan recalled a dinner in Belgrade with people from the arts industry, when the subject of Serbia’s president came up. “They all just lifted the telephones and put them under the leg, on the chair, so they covered the microphone. Everybody did that,” he said. “If you say something against Vučić, you will never get the money for the next project … When they speak about Vučić, they’re whispering.”

The actor said he was previously expelled from Serbia but believed – before the weekend’s incident – that he would be able to return.

Pen International, an association of writers, said it was “concerned” about reports that Stukan was deported from Serbia.

“I think they [the authorities] don’t know really where they should put me in, and what they want to do with me,” Stukan said. “They just don’t want me to be in Serbia.”

Capitalism, artificial intelligence, Renaissance history and motherhood are among the topics explored in the books on the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction longlist.

Sixteen women – including Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein, Observer art critic Laura Cumming and historian Tiya Miles – are now in the running for the £30,000 prize, launched last year to redress the relatively low numbers of women recognised in nonfiction prizes.

The “groundbreaking” longlisted titles are “about redressing wrongs – so whether that’s exposing truth, or revealing hypocrisy or uncovering hidden stories – there’s a dedication to truth”, said chair of judges and historian Suzannah Lipscomb.

Klein was longlisted for Doppelganger, in which she writes about being mistaken for the feminist writer turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. Prize judge and biographer Anne Sebba said that Doppelganger was “such a clever book” because Klein “takes what, on the face of it, is a simple idea of having a double, someone who is frequently thought of as her, but then expands this to construct a dark comedy of a rather terrifying mirror image world”.

Miles made the longlist for All That She Carried, a story of slavery centred on a sack that an enslaved woman passes on to her daughter. The book “finds a way to give voice to the wordless by using a mundane, domestic object – a cloth sack and its contents – to thread an extraordinary tale through the generations”, wrote Colin Grant in his Guardian review.

Quick Guide

Women’s prize for nonfiction 2024

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The Britannias by Alice Albinia (Allen Lane) 

Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley (Bloomsbury) 

Eve by Cat Bohannon (Hutchinson
Heinemann)

Intervals by Marianne Brooker (Fitzcarraldo)  

Shadows at Noon by Joya Chatterji (Bodley Head)  

Thunderclap by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus)

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista (Grove Press)

Wifedom by Anna Funder  

Matrescence by Lucy Jones (Allen Lane)

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane) 

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Hamish Hamilton) 

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles (Profile) 

Code-Dependent by Madhumita Murgia (Picador) 

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus)  

Young Queens by Leah Redmond Chang (Bloomsbury)

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair (4th Estate)

The 16 titles will be narrowed down to a shortlist of six, to be announced on 27 March. The winner will be announced alongside the fiction prize on 13 June. Along with the cash prize, the winning author will receive an artwork, known as The Charlotte, created by sculptor Ann Christopher.

Cummings was selected for Thunderclap, about the early deaths of Dutch painter Carel Fabritius and Cumming’s father. “I love this book because of the way she intertwines a subtle and tender love of her father with a deep understanding of Dutch art,” said Sebba.

Lipscomb noted that many, though not all of the longlisted books feature a “personal voice”, weaving academic research with personal reflections. “There’s a sense of owning one’s subjectivity as an author that comes out of these, and I think that might be a zeitgeisty thing – it might be that if we’d launched this prize 10 years ago, that wouldn’t be the case. But that’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Other memoiristic titles chosen include Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, about growing up Rastafari, and Intervals by Marianne Brooker, about her mother’s illness and death.

The launch of the nonfiction prize came in the wake of research commissioned by the Women’s prize that found that only 35% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the past 10 years were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes.

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While the longlist was made up of “brilliant” books across “economics and technology and science and history and investigative journalism”, said Lipscomb, “there were fewer books submitted in some of these areas than one might have hoped, and perhaps fewer books submitted in adjacent areas, like philosophy, literary criticism, geopolitics, mathematics, sports”. Lipscomb hopes that the prize will encourage publishers to “invest in female writers writing in these fields”.

Also on the longlist are The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, The Britannias by Alice Albinia, Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley, Eve by Cat Bohannon, Shadows at Noon by Joya Chatterji, Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista, Wifedom by Anna Funder, Matrescence by Lucy Jones, Flat Place by Noreen Masud, Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia and Young Queens by Leah Redmond Chang.

This year’s prize was open to books published in the UK between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024. Alongside Lipscomb and Sebba on the judging panel are fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna, author Nicola Rollock, and winner of the 2018 Women’s prize for fiction Kamila Shamsie.

The Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, a leading figure in the Soviet underground literary scene who later protested against Vladimir Putin, has died days after being hit by a car, his daughter has said.

Rubinstein is considered as one of the founders of the Russian conceptualism, an avant-garde literary movement that mocked the official doctrine of socialist realism in the 1970s-80s.

“My dad, Lev Rubinstein, died today,” his daughter, Maria, wrote on a LiveJournal blog picked up by Russian media.

The poet had created his own genre, between poetry and theatre, by writing short sentences on perforated cards and reading the “note-card poems” on stage.

His daily work as a librarian amid the bureaucracy of the Soviet era inspired his performances, which combined absurdist comedy and improvisation.

“Shakily poetic, astute and ironic, he was himself a way of perceiving the world,” the human rights organisation Memorial said in an homage to the writer.

After the USSR collapsed, Rubinstein shot to prominence and his work was widely published.

He was openly hostile to Putin’s government and regularly protested against the Kremlin’s intensifying repression and human rights violations. When Putin launched his full-scale assault on Ukraine, Rubinstein signed with other renowned writers an open letter denouncing a “criminal war” and the “lies” from the Kremlin.

Rubinstein had not been arrested or prosecuted during the conflict in Ukraine, Memorial said, even as the Kremlin’s repression reached new heights. “But his tragic death in January 2024, just on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the catastrophe seems bitterly symbolic,” Memorial said.

“Our tense desperation and hope, the powerlessness and fear of the past days, the coma and muteness of Lev Rubinstein – this is us today.”

The 76-year-old was hit by a car in Moscow on 8 January and taken to hospital in a critical condition.

The transport department of Moscow said “the driver did not slow down” as Rubinstein was crossing the street. According to preliminary information, the driver had been involved in 19 traffic violations in 12 months, the department said. Authorities have launched an investigation into the accident, it added.

It is a hazard to read on an empty stomach. What is it about words that makes things taste so delicious? I can still recall the twelfth-grade English class, held just before lunch, in which we were cruelly called upon to analyze, well, lunch: the sumptuous one described by Virginia Woolf at the start of “A Room of One’s Own,” involving soles in cream, partridges “with all their retinue of sauces and salads,” sprouts “foliated as rosebuds but more succulent,” and a pudding so spectacular that to “relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.” I had never tasted partridge. I still have never tasted partridge. Described by Woolf, it is my favorite food.

Reading while hungry is not a predicament known to Dwight Garner, because, as he tells us in “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” his winning new book, he cannot read without also eating, and, as a book critic for the Times, he reads quite a bit. The association between these two sustaining pleasures began long ago, during his boyhood in West Virginia and Florida. Garner takes a good hard look in memory’s mirror and tells us what he sees: “a soft kid, inclined toward embonpoint, ‘husky’ in the department-store lingo, a brown-eyed boy with chafing thighs.” Riding his bicycle home from school beneath the blazing Gulf Coast sun, “sizzled crisp and pink with sweat,” he sounds fairly edible himself.

Garner’s early reading tastes were indiscriminate; the library kept him well stocked. His eating habits were necessarily narrower, dependent on the supplies his parents had in the kitchen. He liked pretzels, mayonnaise-and-cheese sandwiches, Hydrox cookies with milk, and potato chips. The bread was white; the drink was red, made from a mix. “Everyone wasn’t a sophisticate,” he writes. His father’s people were “coal miners and gunsmiths, all of them hunters.” Their freezer was full of venison. Fascinatingly, Garner’s paternal grandfather was a follower of Horace Fletcher, a.k.a. the Great Masticator, one of those freaky food influencers of the Victorian era, who advised chewing a meal until it turned to liquid in the mouth. Garner’s mother was not an enthusiastic cook—her cuisine was heavy on Kraft and Cool Whip—but, many years later, he remains devoted to the memory of her egg foo yong.

From these undistinguished origins arose Garner the gourmand. He loves to eat and to drink, to cook and be cooked for, to stay in and to go out. Some of his tastes, he feels, demand defending; he gives a few paragraphs over to the furor that erupted when, in 2012, he declared his love for the peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich. But his credentials are convincing. He belongs to something called “an offal club,” has slaughtered at least one rooster in his time, and suffers from gout. In a past life, he delivered pizza for Domino’s.

A really good eater, like a really good reader, must have two qualities in abundance: curiosity and capacity. Plainly, in the food department, Garner has both. When he lived in Garrison, New York, he indulged in an impressive ritual on his commute from the city: a Martini at Jimmy’s Corner, the legendary midtown boxing bar, followed by oysters at Grand Central Oyster Bar, and then, upon arrival at home, a steak dinner prepared by his wife, the writer Cree LeFavour, who was then working on her cookbook “The New Steak.” One of the big subjects of Garner’s book is happiness, and much of his seems to be owed to LeFavour. She grew up in a family of adventurous restaurateurs. “In the kitchen, Cree and I are opposites,” he writes—she cooks by feel, he by recipe—and the same goes for them as eaters:

She’ll have the in-season fruit with yogurt; I’ll take the
three-cheese omelet with home fries. She has never, to the best of my
knowledge, eaten in a food court or on an airplane because it wouldn’t
occur to her. Why not wait for something better? I smell the warm
cookies in first class and can’t wait for my little tub of indistinct
protein—is that a belly-button lint cutlet?—to arrive in 23D.

Needless to say, the relationship has thrived.

Garner is a good host; he doesn’t just talk about himself. Memoir, thoughts about food, and literary criticism are stacked, in “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” like the bright layers of a Venetian cookie, in chapters devoted to breakfast, lunch, drinking, and dinner, plus one on grocery shopping (Garner eschews the easy romance of the greenmarket for the frigid, fluorescent abundance of the American supermarket) and another on swimming and napping, two activities that provide a necessary break in his daily dining project. (One quibble: where is the chapter about cleaning up?) Garner’s literary cellar is vast, and he always has just the right quote or anecdote ready to decant. In “Breakfast,” for instance, we learn that Thomas Hardy’s favorite morning meal was a stew of parsley, onions, and bread that bore the unappetizing name of “kettle-broth,” and are given convincing evidence that “no writer has attended to mornings and their promise as closely as has Toni Morrison.” In “Lunch,” a riff on the place of hot dogs in American life skips from H. L. Mencken to Philip Roth, Audre Lorde, Larry McMurtry, and Vivian Gornick. One nice thing about Garner’s book is that he doesn’t just go for the classics. Younger or more recently published writers like Bryan Washington, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Anthony Veasna So all have a place at his table.

Reading Garner got me thinking about the literary food I have loved. There are the preposterously lavish feasts of Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” like one that Frédéric, the novel’s hero, is treated to soon after his arrival in Paris: “He had ten sorts of mustard to choose from. He ate gazpacho, curry, ginger, Corsican blackbirds, Roman lasagne; he drank extraordinary wines, lip-fraoli, and Tokay.” On the other end of the spectrum is the earthy meal enjoyed by Aimée, the female con artist in Jean-Patrick Manchette’s noir novel “Fatale,” who celebrates the completion of a job by rubbing herself with stolen banknotes and eating a choucroute “which smelt like piss and sperm.” Then there is picky Mr. Woodhouse, father to Emma in Jane Austen’s “Emma,” who feels that food was put on this Earth to kill him. “While his hospitality would have welcomed his visitors to every thing,” Austen writes, “his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.” Every so often, he makes an exception. “You and I will have a nice basin of gruel together,” he tells his daughter—a ghastly invitation, warmly extended.

One of the best-ever openings of a short story can be found in Grace Paley’s “The Used-Boy Raisers,” in which Faith, the narrator, cooks breakfast for two men, her husband and her ex:

There were two husbands disappointed by eggs.
I don’t like them that way either, I said. Make your own eggs. They sighed in unison.

Paley had a way with verbs. In the same story, Faith does not brew a pot of coffee but kindles it. Later, after the men have finally, thank God, left, she will pour some into a mug that says “MAMA” to enjoy a private moment with her thoughts. “How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals,” Iris Murdoch wrote. And how fortunate, too, to be word-consuming ones, because reading, like eating, never ends. ♦