Back in 1995, when she was in her mid-20s, Min Jin Lee quit her job as a corporate lawyer. As a teenager she had been diagnosed as a hepatitis B carrier and doctors told her she was highly likely to develop liver cancer in her 20s or 30s. “I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first,” the now 57-year-old Korean-American author says of her decision to turn her back on a regular pay cheque and healthcare. “I was told so many times that I was going to get sicker and sicker, that I’ve always felt that if I can get a really good book out then I’m done.”

Lee, looking very much alive and well, is on a video call from her home in Harlem, New York, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind her. We are meeting to discuss the publication of her third novel, American Hagwon, the final part in what she calls her “Korean trilogy”, following Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and her 2017 international bestseller, Pachinko, stylishly adapted for Apple TV in 2022. “Korean quartet!” she corrects me now. Thanks to experimental drugs, she is now so healthy she can commit to another book. “Before I turn 70, I should turn in my manuscript,” she jokes. “I’m writing the four books that I wanted to write and after that I’m going to take a long nap.”

Lee averages a book a decade. It took 11 years of writing before Free Food for Millionaires, about the children of Korean immigrants in New York in the 90s, was published. She worked on Pachinko, which spans nearly a century, and ranges from a fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea to Wall Street in the 1980s, for 20 years. It was voted one of the New York Times 100 best books of the century and has sold more than 5m globally. American Hagwon, which follows one family from Seoul to Sydney to California in the years leading up to and after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, was bought in a 12-way publishing auction. She has recently returned from Germany on a research trip for her next book, her “European novel”, which already has a title: Marshall Plan. Its starting point is the 1963 bilateral agreement when thousands of Koreans were sent to West Germany to work as miners or nurses to boost the economy back home. The only thing all four novels have in common is the Korean diaspora.

“I’ve had to have lessons to do this, to talk to you,” Lee confesses, smiling into the screen. A once desperately shy and poor girl from Seoul, she is both modest about her success – “I’m used to feeling unwanted” – and proud that she has pulled it off. “Wow, I have done this. I have fucking done this. I would love to know how many Asian American women have been published in the New York Review of Books,” Lee told the Believer Magazine. Her NYRB essay was an indepth appraisal of the work of fellow novelist Han Kang, who became the first Korean Nobel prize for literature laureate in 2024. While Lee’s sprawling multi­generational epics couldn’t be more different from Han’s slim, poetic novels, they both tackle periods of their country’s troubled history that the world has chosen to forget. Ironically, they have come to prominence on the crest of hallyu, the Korean Wave, the government-sponsored cultural push that has given the west K-pop bands and Squid Game.

Each weighing in at more than 500 pages, Lee’s novels take up as much space on a bookshelf as the life’s work of other writers. “I would love to write a short novel, but I don’t know how with these subjects,” she says. “I always think: ‘God, pick something easier. What is the matter with you? How about two people having feelings at a kitchen table?’”

As big-hearted as they are physically hefty, her books have the immersive narrative drive, social conscience and moral purpose of the Victorian classics, on which she trained herself as a writer. “Almost all the people that I admire the most in terms of writers are old dead British writers,” she says. “Austen and Eliot, they have enormous hearts, they’re so romantic in terms of what they think human beings can be.”

If her first two novels dealt with assimilation and colonisation, respectively, American Hagwon takes on one of the most important things to Koreans around the world: education. “Hagwon” is the term for private cram schools that are ubiquitous in South Korea. “If there was one word that I wanted you to know, that it’s so important for you to understand any Korean person you’ll ever meet, it’s ‘hagwon’,” Lee says. “In Korea that word is almost like the word water.” Some publishers were uneasy with Pachinko as a title, because it was unfamiliar to western readers. But this noisy pinball machine found in pachinko parlours across Korea was the perfect metaphor for the unpredictability of success, especially when the odds are stacked against you, as they were for the Korean-Japanese immigrants.

In American Hagwon, John and Helen Koh are forced to uproot their family after a business betrayal: John swaps a well-paid job in insurance to manage a nail bar in LA, and their three children – Bo, DH and Mido – have to learn harder lessons than those taught in any classroom. More than 600 pages devoted to studying, tutoring and the establishment of a hagwon business, a concept unfamiliar to most readers outside Korea, might be a tough sell. But American Hagwon is about much more than swotting for exams. Lee wants to show the true cost of the overachieving Asian stereotype, the sacrifices of the “tiger mom” and the inequities of the elite education system. “How do you live a wise life?” the novel asks. It is a story of “power and ambition and getting to your goals”, she says. “In America, we really worship work but we also really worship success. We don’t always worship how people get there. In Korea, people really do examine how you get there.”

She likes to set out her thesis in the opening line of each of her novels: “Competence can be a curse” in Free Food for Millionaires; “History has failed us, but no matter” in Pachinko. “The rules of engagement have changed already,” she declares at the start of American Hagwon. “There was a time when we felt we could sort of predict things,” she says now. “But right now most people are feeling: ‘I have no idea what just happened, no idea what will happen. I don’t know how to raise my children or plan my career because shit just keeps happening. And the people who are changing the rules aren’t sending us memos.’ I think that is where advanced economies are right now. Of course,” she adds, “people who are not from advanced economies have always felt this way.”

All her novels take the Asian immigrant experience from the margins to the mainstream. “In my pages, I want to be the centre,” as she puts it. But she is also reflecting our global contemporary predicament. Diaspora “is a permanent condition for every single person in the world,” she says. “Now we have economic diaspora and we also have environmental diaspora. The people that I focus on are obviously Koreans, but what I’m really writing about is when you have to leave because you’re no longer useful or you’re no longer wanted, what do you do? You have to adapt.”

Lee’s own story has the epic sweep of her novels. Her father was a war refugee who fled North Korea when he was 16, never to see his family again. He met her mother, a piano teacher, in Seoul. The family moved to the US when Min was seven, where they lived in an apartment in Elmhurst, Queens. The middle of three sisters, she remembers it as an “ugly little hovel”, with mice and bugs. Her father bought a newsstand, where the young Min would sit on the weekends. After a year, they bought a wholesale jewellers, not much bigger than the newspaper kiosk, selling costume jewellery to street pedlars. Both her parents worked in the shop six days a week. Her father is now 91, her mother 86, and she visits them in New Jersey after church each Sunday.

“I didn’t have any friends and I really couldn’t get on,” she says of her own school days. Things improved when she got into Bronx High School of Science (also attended by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani). But she felt out of her depth once again at Yale, where “there were so few Asians and everybody was so much wealthier”. Her two years as a lawyer, condensing boxes of documents into 20-page memos, proved a perfect training for a novelist intent on taking on huge hunks of Korean history. She married her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese and half European, when she was 24, and their son was born when she was 29. “I really did think I was going to die,” she says. “I thought I had to get everything done.”

Walking home from the subway one day after reading VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, she realised that here was her subject. “I had to write about the disgraced, the poor and the earnest strivers of Queens,” she wrote in an essay in the New York Times. She took classes at Harvard Business School and a whole semester in millinery at a fashion college as research for Free Food for Millionaires.

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In 2007, the year it was finally published, Duffy was relocated to Tokyo. The seed for Pachinko had been sown 20 years earlier at Yale, when she attended a lecture by a visiting Japanese missionary about a Korean immigrant boy in Japan who killed himself because he was bullied. She had a draft of a novel, entitled Motherland, but it was too “dry” and “angry”. Living in Tokyo and talking to hundreds of Korean immigrants – street sellers, security guards, Uber drivers – Pachniko came to life. “Literary fiction must incorporate those stories,” she says. “Writing about work is something that social novelists must do.”

It is no surprise that these epic novels about ordinary people at the mercy of cataclysmic social and economic changes have struck a chord right now. “The thing that I’ve always been able to do is to listen. And I’m willing to listen if someone will tell me how difficult their lives are,” she says. But she also wants to capture the resilience and joy of the people she speaks to. “There’s a wish for more love and recognition that regular human beings have and also a kind of buoyancy,” she says. “You read the dismal horrible stuff, but then we still have sex and have children. How do I connect that? The way I see it is because we adapt and we have humour.”

She has no truck with the vogue for autofiction – “It’s for a certain reader. I’m probably not her” – which she feels has no place for the people she writes about. Having been on judging panels for many book prizes in the US, she has come to the conclusion that she doesn’t fit in with other contemporary writers. “My peers are writing wonderful, incredibly moving things, but I don’t know how to write like that.”

She survived her wilderness years by following American author Grace Paley’s advice to writers to “keep a low overhead”, and also by having “a low overhead for expectations of recognition”. Today, she still leads a very quiet life. “I’m not a cool literary It person,” she says. “But I get to do what I want to do.” Her working day begins by reading and making notes on a chapter of the Bible, which Willa Cather used to do before writing. She diagrams everything – character outlines, plot – and looks for gaps. When she has a first draft she is happy with, she throws it away. Her manuscripts push 200,000 words. “I’ll just start all over,” she says, breezily. “It’s so much cleaner when you do it that way.”

It is only since the success of the Pachinko TV series (on which she is remaining tight-lipped, after withdrawing as an executive producer) that she feels part of the publishing scene. “It’s like I’m visiting. I feel like, they’re letting me come and I’ll behave myself and I’ll be on time, but if I’m not asked again, I will just be grateful for the opportunity.” But there is nothing modest about her literary ambitions. “I want to build a palace,” she says of her novels. “I want to build a palace that stands.”

In return for the commitment of their time, she wants the reader to feel changed by the experience, just as she has been by reading 19th-century novels. “I probably feel more British than anything because I’ve read so much British literature, over and over again,” she says. “That is what I am trying to do, in some ways. I’m trying to make you Korean.”

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”

The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.

Born in 1928 and raised in south London by a fearsome Polish-Jewish grandmother and absurdly ineffectual parents (a tobacco salesman and a failed singer), Brookner was a highly academic only child. After a degree at King’s College London, she briefly tasted freedom as a student in Paris, but was soon dragged back to care for her extraordinarily needy mother. Yoked to home for the next decade, she managed, nevertheless, to become a brilliant art critic and a charismatic lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she stayed until retirement.

In the introduction, Lee describes hearing the author’s voice saying, repeatedly, “Go away”, and Brookner’s 20s and 30s were the “most hidden, the least witnessed” of all. Brookner did her utmost to erase her life, and Lee is forced, therefore, to mine any detail she can find. As well as Brookner’s academic work and extensive reading habits, we get her poor handwriting, fear of trains, love of perfumes and at one particularly desperate point, salary increases over two decades. A couple of love affairs in her 30s fizzled out, but if there was ever a record of her feelings, Brookner expunged it. The first 200 pages, then, can be hard going. She was, says Lee, through gritted teeth, “an object of mystery and puzzlement”.

But Lee persists – always rake thin, Brookner kept slimming biscuits in her handbag; she loved babies; she doled out tranquillisers to nervous PhD candidates – and just as this enterprise starts to feel doomed, something miraculous happens. The tireless details begin to cohere and Brookner steps out of the shadows, intriguing, contradictory – the super brain who shaved 10 years off her age in her own Who’s Who entry; the self-proclaimed “loneliest woman in London” who had loads of friends.

The older she gets, the more interesting this book becomes. In 1979, her beloved Courtauld mentor, friend and boss, Anthony Blunt, was exposed as a Soviet spy. Shaken, Brookner remained loyal until she discovered he’d used her to extract information from a hospitalised colleague.

Reeling and depressed, facing another lonely summer, she found herself writing fiction. Her process was extraordinary. Each novel took only three months from start to finish. She’d roam London forming sentences in her head, then simply write them down, at speed. Hilary Mantel, a fervent admirer, said Brookner arrived as a novelist perfectly formed, “as if she had hatched from a marbled egg”. She would repeat this process, annually, for more than two decades.

In 1984, her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, about a woman who jilts her fiancee and retreats to a Swiss hotel, won the Booker prize. Pretty much everyone expected JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun or Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot to win. The misogyny was mind-bending. At the ceremony, Ballard hissed, “You stole my Booker.” Private Eye snarked about “Hotel du Lac of Interest” and a grim pattern of critical disdain was set. For the rest of Brookner’s writing life, critics would carp about “doily” novels and compare her to Mills & Boon. Profiles were invariably illustrated with sad spinsters holding cups of tea. It tormented her. But she kept on writing.

She was, personally, far from isolated. She had devoted friends, including the Virago publisher Carmen Callil and fellow writers such as Rosamond Lehmann or Julian Barnes, who offers loving memories here. He was so intimidated by her eloquence when they lunched that he’d feel himself inserting semicolons into his own speech.

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Was she a literary genius? She once, brilliantly, described novel-writing as “trying very hard to remember something which has not yet taken place”. Lee offers genuinely transporting literary criticism, unearthing the elegance and complexity of the work, but admits the compulsive production of a book a year diluted the impact and sometimes the quality. Still, she singles out three – Family and Friends, Latecomers and The Next Big Thing – as truly “outstanding” novels. Thankfully, it is no longer cool to Brookner-bash. This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author – who would be appalled by our scrutiny. Above all, it shows that the work deserves our full attention.

As the 2026 winner of the Stella prize, Lee Lai has established two new firsts: the first ever non-binary winner with her book Cannon, which is the first graphic novel to win the $60,000 Australian literary award for women and non-binary writers.

Cannon follows the titular, queer Chinese woman living in Montreal on the “uncool side of [her] twenties”. Cannon’s real name is Lucy, which became Luce then (loose) Cannon – and much like her unwanted nickname, she shoulders responsibility without complaint. During the day she cares for her gung-gung (maternal grandfather), a former tyrant enfeebled by age, without any help from her emotionally avoidant mother; and by night she works in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant, corralling chaos into order. Cannon’s longtime best friend Trish uses her as a soundboard for all of her problems, and is secretly mining Cannon’s life as a troubling source of inspiration for her writing career.

Speaking to Guardian Australia before her win was announced at a ceremony in Brisbane on Wednesday night, Lai says, “It’s been a challenge to keep it secret, especially with many wonderfully nosy friends.”

The Stella prize was first opened to non-binary writers in 2021. Lai, who was born in Melbourne and is now based in Montreal, was first nominated for the Stella in 2023 for her debut Stone Fruit, which won the Lambda Literary award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel prize and two Ignatz awards.

Being the first graphic novelist to win the Stella is “pretty cool”, she says, adding: “I hope that this is a win for the comics community as well, and that it makes some readers more interested in reading comics.”

As for the impact of $60,000 on her life? “Ultimately, money is time. None of us have a lot of that. This money will let me go for a very long time.”

Generally, she says, the graphic novelist community “doesn’t have a lot of money. We joke that we are endlessly doing fundraisers and passing around the same $20 bill. In my world, this is a lot.”

The Stella judges have praised Cannon as “a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the ‘responsible one’, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.)

“Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.”

Lai began writing Cannon in 2019, working on it on and off for years while “paying the bills with the comics-related or illustration gigs I could take”. She found herself rewriting it as her world changed. “At the start, it was very fun to have an objective of taking a long-term friendship and grinding it down,” Lai says. “Then the pandemic happened and we couldn’t see our friends and everyone’s friendships were feeling a lot more fragile and it was no longer fun to do that. So I ended up writing a lot more optimistic outcome for Cannon and Trish than I originally planned.”

Cannon is a story about failures of communication and an exercise in showing, not telling: from a quick glance, Lai’s positioning of speech bubbles tells the reader if a character is being interrupted or ignored, if they are pensive or frustrated. It is mostly monochrome, with impactful pops of colour, and the pages are almost entirely four grid.

It is a restrictive way to work, which Lai enjoys. “If you create expectation [in the reader], when you break it, it’s impactful. You can control the reader’s pacing – you can tell them when to halt, when to pause, when to speed up. I’m manipulating a reader to get lost in the story a bit and then, with a single page turn, I screech the brakes.”

Cannon, who is stoic to a fault, is “some really extreme exaggerations of some of the ways I am”, Lai says. Cannon’s best friend Trish, meanwhile, is the embodiment of Lai’s “anxieties and cynicisms about neoliberal diversity discourse in the cultural sector”; Trish is writing a novel heavily based on Cannon’s life without her knowledge, but frets more about whether she is a “fucking cliche” for writing a gay-immigrant novel that will likely be attractive to white funding boards than the ethics of swiping her friend’s story.

“These are the sort of things that you think about [as a writer],” Lai says. “I wanted the reader to feel as uncomfortable as I do around those questions.”

Lai cites graphic novelists Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Craig Thompson (Blankets), Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth), Chester Brown (Louis Riel) and cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (Skim) as influences whose work had helped to make “graphic novels be recognised as a legitimate form of literature”.

“Like everybody, my understanding of comics was once superheroes and Peanuts,” she says. “And then I read Skim and Ghost World and saw that, actually, something else is possible here.”

The term graphic novel is sometimes disputed by those who dismiss it as a pretentious marketing term to make comics more palatable to adult readers. Asked for her opinion, Lai laughs: “There is an irreverence around the term ‘comic’ that I like and there is something snooty about ‘graphic novel’ that I try to stay away from. There’s a distancing from comics’ heritage – I’m like, ‘Our heritage is Peanuts! Accept it.’”

Too much of the literature taught in UK schools is putting children off reading and thrillers should become part of the curriculum, one of the world’s biggest selling authors has argued.

Lee Child, the British writer of Jack Reacher novels, which have sold more than 100m copies worldwide, said: “I can totally understand why, if you’re an English teacher and you’ve read all your life and you love this stuff and you’ve been to university, then you want to introduce the big, major masterpieces. But that’s too much for kids.”

He added it was even more of an issue because of social media: “Now it is just so fragmented and so urgent and so breathless and so when do you get the time to sit and read?”

He has also argued thrillers should be on the curriculum and in school libraries. He said: “You should have whatever is compelling and whatever gets people into the habit of reading. Then you can have the fancy stuff later, of course, but don’t start with it.”

Child was speaking at HMP Doncaster, a category B prison, where he was having literacy sessions with inmates in what he said he hoped would become a national programme. Many had been put off reading at school, he said.

It was his third Doncaster visit and at the sessions the men were gripped. Each had been encouraged to write and Child listened to how it went and offered constructive feedback.

He told the men to write about themselves. “My books are about Jack Reacher but they’re really about me,” he said. “It’s what I want to be, what I want to do, how I would live if I could.”

Speaking later, Child said the prisoners were often people “outfaced by big works of literature” during their formal education and that everyone stood to benefit from the sessions.

He added: “Ideally, what we wanted to do was make everybody’s day a little bit easier in the prison world. Anecdotally, what we’re hearing is that if they’re reading all day or they’ve got a writing task to do, then the atmosphere is much calmer, is much more relaxed, everybody has a happier time.”

Child said he believed increasing literacy skills would help to cut reoffending rates. “Deep down, I think what every person in Britain wants is a safer community,” he said. “Wherever they are, they’d like less crime, more safety around them. That is what kicked this off. How do you do that?”

Child, who relocated to the UK from the US after the re-election of Donald Trump, also stressed the project was not about being soft on crime. “I’m not a soft-hearted person,” he said. “I’m not a do-gooder. I’m a thoroughly practical person and this is a thoroughly practical thing.”

John Butler, a prisoner taking part in the sessions, said he was enjoying them and had been writing off the back of them. As a young man he got into trouble because he was not learning at school, he said.

Child hatched the literacy sessions plan with the Labour MP for Colne Valley, Paul Davies. Together they pitched it directly to the prisons minister, James Timpson.

So far they have been to five prisons, with Davies also hosting democracy sessions. “The proposal is to go to 20 and then establish a regional model,” said Davies. “Obviously Lee will be involved, but he’ll also be working with a lot of other key writers as well. The idea is that someone like Lee is a catalyst. He inspires people.”

Child was joined at the sessions by Jake Richards, a justice minister with responsibility for sentencing. “We sometimes forget, when we’re sitting in the MoJ [Ministry of Justice] and we look at prison numbers, that behind every single number there is a person who has committed an offence and is serving their time – and that’s right but also has real vulnerabilities and a story,” Richards said.

“Seeing what we can do to ensure that those individuals when they leave here have the skills and the confidence to contribute and not return to a life of crime is a big challenge and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day, has died aged 75.

In a statement to Radio New Zealand, Tamahori’s family said he had Parkinson’s and died “peacefully at home”.

They added: “His legacy endures with his whānau [family], his mokopuna [grandchild], every film-maker he inspired, every boundary he broke, and every story he told with his genius eye and honest heart.

“A charismatic leader and fierce creative spirit, Lee championed Māori talent both on and off screen … We’ve lost an immense creative spirit.”

Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1950, of mixed Maori and British ancestry, Tamahori worked his way up through the Australian and New Zealand film industry in the 1970s and 80s, crewing on a number of films for Geoff Murphy (including Goodbye Pork Pie and The Quiet Earth) and acting as first assistant director for Nagisa Oshima on the high-profile international production Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.

Tamahori broke into directing features with Once Were Warriors, a tough drama about the brutality of life for a Māori family struggling to survive in Auckland. On its release in 1994 it became New Zealand’s highest grossing film and went on to make an international impact. As a result, Tamahori was hired to make period noir Mulholland Falls, starring Nick Nolte and Chazz Palminteri, to moderate acclaim and box office.

However, Tamahori was now considered a reliable Hollywood operator, making the survival thriller The Edge, featuring Anthony Hopkins opposite Bart the bear in a script by David Mamet, and Along Came a Spider, a James Patterson thriller starring Morgan Freeman.

He then took on his most high-profile job, the Bond film Die Another Day, which would become famous for its invisible car and Halle Berry’s orange bikini. It would also prove to be Pierce Brosnan’s last outing as 007, before the reins were handed over to Daniel Craig. As Tamahori himself noted, the advent of the Bourne franchise ended up making the Brosnan era look a little old-fashioned, but the film proved a hit with audiences on its release in 2002, if not necessarily with critics.

After Bond, Tamahori went on to another putative blockbuster sequel, XXX: State of the Union starring Ice Cube, after the original’s star Vin Diesel dropped out. He then made Nic Cage sci-fi thriller Next and political fable The Devil’s Double, about Saddam Hussein’s son Uday and his body double, both played by Dominic Cooper.

Tamahori subsequently returned to New Zealand to make Mahana, based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, about a fictional Māori patriarch, in which he cast his Once Were Warriors lead actor Temuera Morrison. Saying it was shot as a “western, specifically a 1950s American western”, Tamahori was phlegmatic at its failure at the box office in its home country. “It’s a period film about a bygone era and it deals with the older generation, so young people didn’t go and see it.”

In 2024 he released The Convert, starring Guy Pearce as a British missionary who becomes involved with local Māori.

When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.

This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee’s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No deception is being practised here, and if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans.

The short stories, written in Lee’s youth, are all badly underdeveloped. Most fail to work even as vignettes. One centres on trying to find a place to unload a truck in Manhattan; another on a temporary change to the way the doxology is sung in a Methodist church. A slender piece about the quirks of New York movie audiences is categorised as a story, but feels more like a newspaper sketch. The young Lee seems to have little sense of what a story is.

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On the positive side, there is already wit and charisma in the voice. One narrator, returning to her southern home town, recognises “a tall young man whose face belonged to the Wade family, but whose body showed extensive Talbert influence. He was Talbert Wade, of course.” This may be slight, but it’s elegantly done. There are also hints of iconoclastic anger struggling to get out, especially in The Water Tower, where a 12-year-old Mississippi girl erroneously thinks she is pregnant. Understanding that being an unwed mother would wreck the lives of her whole family, she decides the only way to save them is to destroy her shameful body. With another draft or two, this story could have been truly haunting. But the version we’ve been given is meandering and clumsy, and peters out inconsequentially. Perhaps the strongest story in the collection, The Cat’s Meow, deals with the Jim Crow-era mass incarceration of Black men. Here, the dialogue of the clueless white people is painfully convincing, but the narration keeps jarringly falling into the conventional chirpiness of mid-century women’s magazines.

If the stories are juvenilia, the essays are rote outings on subjects such as “Love is the most important thing”, “Reading matters” and “My happiest Christmas”. The essay on love includes such insights as “Man is on his way to Venus, but he still hasn’t learned to live with his wife … Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: depend upon it, he will – should he cease to love.” The overwhelming feeling with these is that Lee was nagged by a publicist or friend into writing something, and struggled to achieve the minimum word count. It’s initially exciting to notice an essay on Truman Capote, Lee’s close childhood friend. But this turns out to be a puff piece written for the Book of the Month Club newsletter, and consists of stuff like: “Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalising game of discovering Truman; what Truman found in Kansans will make people everywhere discover themselves.”

If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But it’s more properly seen – and will surely be read – for the light it sheds on Lee’s life. As such, it’s obliquely fascinating, largely because it radiates repression. Often there’s a sense that we’re seeing the side of Harper Lee that wasn’t exceptional, but representative of a generation of women who were mostly muzzled. Again and again, the narration is choked off just when things begin to get challenging. The gender nonconformity of the protagonists – all thinly disguised versions of Lee – is often obvious but never explicitly mentioned. The conventionally cheery tone is almost a hostile presence, drowning out and censoring Lee’s real thoughts. Beneath the surface, we often feel the stubborn surging of the excluded. Lee writes in The Cat’s Meow: “I suppose a lot of people like me have mastered the first lesson of living at home these days: if you don’t agree with what you hear, place your tongue between your teeth and bite hard.” We feel those painfully gritted teeth on every page of this book. In a time of rising censorship, it’s salutary to be reminded that an author as important as Harper Lee came so close to being entirely silenced.

The Diamond Dagger for lifetime contribution to crime writing has been awarded to two authors for the first time after judges “almost came to blows” this year.

Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke are the joint recipients of this year’s award, which is administered by the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) and recognises sustained excellence in the genre.

“By an extraordinary quirk of fate, due to our new voting process, this year’s Diamond Dagger is, for the first time in seven decades, being awarded to two authors,” said Maxim Jakubowski, chair of the CWA Daggers’ committee. “If the Booker prize can do it, so can we!”

La Plante is best known for writing the Prime Suspect and Widows television and novel series. Her other series include Lorraine Page, Anna Travis and Trial And Retribution. In 2008, she received a CBE for services to literature, drama and charity. Her memoir is expected to be released later this year.

“La Plante’s Prime Suspect redefined the role of women in police procedurals and made a star of Helen Mirren, while Widows remains a talismanic – and wickedly entertaining – female-led heist caper,” said CWA chair Vaseem Khan.

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James Lee Burke’s series about detective Dave Robicheaux spans more than 20 novels. Burke said he was “honoured and humbled” to receive his award. “It is also an honour to have my name among the best mystery and crime writers in the world,” he added.

Khan said: “James Lee Burke’s lyrical depiction of the American south transcends crime fiction – his prose is often considered among the best to have graced the genre. For many, Dave Robicheaux is the very embodiment of the dogged, morally incorruptible detective beset by personal demons – a beautifully rendered character.”

The Dagger judges “almost came to blows this year and for good reason”, said Khan. “Ultimately, they have chosen to recognise two incredible bodies of work that have each, in their own way, made their mark.”

Jakubowski said La Plante and Burke are “both such wonderful and deserving writers who, between them, demonstrate the marvellous diversity of crime writing”.

This year’s choices were decided by a panel of previous winners including Lee Child, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. Other past winners include Ruth Rendell, PD James and John le Carré. The CWA awards began in 1955 with the first going to Winston Graham, best known for writing the Poldark novels.