Just as I am about to interview this year’s Women’s prize winner, debut American novelist Virginia Evans, at the party on a drizzly evening in a leafy London square, we are interrupted... Read more »
Debut novelist Virginia Evans has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, while the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet took home the nonfiction award, also for her debut. Evans’s The Correspondent... Read more »
Diana Evans has won this year’s Jhalak prose prize for I Want to Talk to You, a nonfiction collection on subjects ranging from Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison to lockdowns and the... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryI’m not sure what we were reading – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams or the poems in Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein – but I was... Read more »
Epistolary novels were once all the rage, from the epic Clarissa to the lurid fun of Dracula. They don’t come along very often now, perhaps because they can be tricky to do... Read more »
Some years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the... Read more »
The Portuguese artist Paula Rego once said: “Work is the most important thing in life.” I agree with her. Work defines who we are in the world. It gives us purpose and... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryIâve never really recovered from the emotional battering meted out by EB Whiteâs Charlotteâs Web. Yes, of course the death of Charlotte was horribly sad, but far worse in... Read more »