For a long time Elif Shafak was referred to as Turkey’s “most widely read female author”. Today, she is surely simply its best loved. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel prize in... Read more »
The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated. Kundizeza’s story... Read more »
Edinburgh-based writer Cherise Saywell has won this year’s BBC national short story award for a “tender” and “taut” story about a young boy caught in the midst of domestic violence. Saywell was... Read more »
What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem... Read more »
There is something farcical – grotesque, even – about life played in reverse. A child falling into a tree. A sandwich emerging from a mouth, bite by reconstituted bite. A doctor unstitching... Read more »
M is a celebrated film actor. A star since childhood, now the face of a major fashion brand, she has been famous all her life. That her career closely resembles Natalie Portman’s has... Read more »
When people think of Alan Turing, they might imagine he was arrogant, isolated, humourless, tortured. A better way of remembering the father of modern computing would be, an academic argues, as “playful,... Read more »
There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and... Read more »
A story widely accused on social media of being written using AI has gone on to win the overall Commonwealth short story prize. Jamir Nazir’s story The Serpent in the Grove went... Read more »