In the autumn of 1983, dozens of carefully chosen readers received an envelope containing a slim, red booklet of sonnets that had been locked away since they were written almost 50 years... Read more »
‘It’s a drag, isn’t it,” Paul McCartney told reporters quizzing him the day after John Lennon’s murder, a soundbite as dispiritingly muted, even callous, as his reaction to his mother’s death when... Read more »
A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee... Read more »
A little over 50 years ago, the American broadcaster Studs Terkel published an oral history based on interviews with 133 workers across the US. This was a time of automation and global... Read more »
Santiago de Chile, 1986, in the dying days of Pinochet’s dictatorship: the streets are flooded with teargas and littered with the remains of anti-government protests. The military is losing its grip on power,... Read more »
I haven’t kept many things from my teenage years. I have a box of photos – hazy snapshots from holidays and parties, captured on disposable cameras and developed at Boots. I have a stack... Read more »
Lebanon may be the most complicated place in the world to be a “mixed” couple. It has no civil marriage law, fifteen personal status laws, and a political system built on sectarianism.... Read more »
If any few pages of Sally Rooneyâs fourth novel blew through the streets on an autumn wind, many a chance reader would be sure who wrote them. Theyâd recognise the sentences precision-engineered... Read more »
Does everyone really have a book in them? And if you want to write one, where do you start? The novelist and podcaster Elizabeth Day, host of the How to Fail series,... Read more »