My earliest reading memoryI only realised how well I knew the Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes when I started reading them to my own children. Every time we read one now, I’m suddenly back... Read more »
Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership.... Read more »
When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White”... Read more »
Kazuo Ishiguro still remembers where he was when he wrote A Pale View of Hills: hunched over the dining room table in a bedsit in Cardiff. He was in his mid-20s then;... Read more »
Writers in the US are at growing risk amid a worldwide crackdown on free speech that has begun to spread to countries previously renowned for unfettered expression and openness, according to a... Read more »
A memoir about growing up in care has won this year’s Gordon Burn prize. Jenni Fagan was revealed as the winner of the £10,000 award for her book Ootlin at a ceremony... Read more »
It is the sort of discussion that literary festivals pride themselves on being able to hold in a nuanced, civilised manner: are certain corporations ethical enough to sponsor the arts? Yet the... Read more »
Keiran Goddard is a poet and novelist whose debut novel, Hourglass, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize in 2022. His second novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, is a worthy successor. A... Read more »
I used to knock on people’s doors and tell them the end of the world was coming. We were born imperfect, I would say, and soon will come the day of Armageddon when... Read more »