Austrian cultural figures have launched a campaign to buy a villa once home to the writer Stefan Zweig after its owner, the automotive magnate Wolfgang Porsche, unexpectedly put it on the market following a row over his plans to build a private tunnel for his car collection.

Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer whose novels inspired the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel, lived in the 17th-century property until 1934 when he was driven out of Salzburg by the Austro-fascist regime and his family was forced to sell it at a rock-bottom price.

The Villa Europa, as it was known in his lifetime, was not only the place where he did much of his writing but was also a cultural meeting point for prominent figures, including James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Richard Strauss.

It was bought in 2020 for €8.4m (£7.2m) by Porsche, who has put it on the market for €12.7m after undertaking renovations. His plans to build a private 500-metre tunnel to transport his car collection to the house had created a public outcry.

Singers, composers and writers are among several thousand people who have signed a petition to the federal and local government, which calls the plans to acquire the Zweig villa “a cultural responsibility to future generations” and an “opportunity to make this unique place publicly accessible and usable … and to make its significance for Austrian and European cultural history tangible for everyone”.

Bernhard Fügenschuh, the rector of the University of Salzburg, which he said had the means to secure the villa, said Austria had a moral obligation to keep it as a place of commemoration for Zweig. The university would see itself as an interim owner until others were able to raise the funds, he added.

“There’s very much a societal responsibility here. As a university, and as a public institution, we’ve decided to take this on because we believe the window of opportunity is potentially very short,” he said.

“This Stefan Zweig villa is, if you will, the most visible symbol of this history, this responsibility, which Austria as a whole carries. And that is why it is so incredibly important.”

Fügenschuh said Porsche’s decision to put the villa on the market had provided the city with a rare opportunity after it had in the past tried to buy it and failed.

He said the university was in discussions with the federal ministry of women, science and research, which needs to approve the plans.

Planning permission to build a tunnel through the Kapuzinerberg, on which the villa is nestled and which caused considerable unrest in Salzburg, is included in the purchase price. However, a new owner would only have until the end of 2028 to utilise it.

Zweig described the house as “romantic and impractical”, writing that among its charms was that it was “inaccessible to cars” and could “only be reached by climbing the more than a hundred steps” of the Kapuzinerberg.

Missouri Williams’s darkly absurd and wilfully grotesque debut novel, The Doloriad, concerned itself with the aftermath of a world-shattering catastrophe. Her second takes place in what feels like the beginning of one. The Vivisectors is set in an ancient and unnamed university town – we could call it Oxford or Cambridge, but let’s not – which is rapidly being overwhelmed by vegetation: avenues lined with “orange columns of flamevine and purple bougainvillea”, arches “dripping with wisteria”, the inescapable “stink of a distant magnolia”. A fraternity of mysterious gardeners seek to keep the chaotic foliage in check, but they are hamstrung by a bitter dispute with university officials. Power games and proxy battles ensue. It is a hot summer and decay is rampant: revolution is in the air.

As in recent work by Sophie Mackintosh or Julia Armfield, this verdant backdrop casts an ominous glow over the action, though Williams writes with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity – she revels in the wretched and the craven. The locus of the novel’s intensity is its narrator, Agathe, an alarmingly cynical young woman. She views everyone she meets as a tragic case, and knows that nothing lies between her and the same sad designation but her ability to see through the stories they’re telling themselves. She rejects self-expression and desire, refusing anything that might compromise her sense of separation and superiority. Her judgments are swift, conclusive and brutal.

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Agathe’s mother is left mute and paralysed. Hearing the news, Agathe feels nothing but annoyance at how her routine has been interrupted. In the wake of this, Agathe’s father – a well-known writer, “famous for his insight” – takes the opportunity to rant at length about how she was the root of all the problems in her parents’ marriage. He demands that Agathe spend time with her mother, who is now in a wheelchair; she is told to take her for regular walks.

On the first of these occasions, Agathe realises that she cannot push the motorised wheelchair through the unchecked and thickening suburban shrubbery. Her solution is punishingly rational: Agathe sits in her mother’s lap and operates the chair from there. “She was a lump, scarcely more alive than the chair in which she was sitting,” she thinks. “There was nothing stopping me from treating her the same way.” Later, Agathe realises her mother has wet herself. “I felt a dampness spreading beneath my thighs and soaking through the thin fabric of my skirt. For a moment I thought she might say my name. She didn’t.” It is hard to say which aspect Agathe finds more pitiable, the urination or her desire to be acknowledged.

Agathe is employed as a personal assistant by an unnamed academic at the university, and she is rarely more cruel than in her comments on her employer, “a mountainous woman with huge, rolling hips” whom she finds unutterably pathetic. The academic seeks to become the confidante of a handsome young graduate student named Adam. She sets Agathe a mission: befriend Adam, find out what he’s thinking and relay it back to her. Thus, the romance plot is set in motion.

How Agathe navigates her feelings for Adam and asserts her independence from her family will define her arc – an outline which could sum up any number of novels. Williams does not unthinkingly recreate this classic formula, she deploys it with purpose, concealing it beneath the gothically overstuffed surface. Ideas are fired at the page: identity politics, family trauma, climate crisis, comic plays and fables, academia, labour, bureaucracy. There is a savage rush of description and dissection happening throughout. But for all the layers of alienation and abjection which encrust Williams’s tale, there remains a model campus romance novel at its heart. It is as if Agathe is burning through cover, until she is finally forced to confront the one story she really can’t comprehend: the love story. And if The Vivisectors is a love story, it is also about love stories – what counts as one, the form it should take, how it might come to be believed by its participants.

Agathe’s story pivots on her repressed need to overturn the anaesthetised narrative she has been telling herself, to excise what she calls the “dark toad in the cistern of my selfhood”. Adam is the vehicle for this transformation: it is no coincidence that we only learn Agathe’s name when, halfway through the book, he asks for it. She is dumbfounded when he takes her hand. It is initially a little disappointing, given the wealth of imagination on show, that when the climactic revolution takes place, it leaves things looking so familiar. But perhaps that is the final sting in the tail, a deception disguised as sweetness – a last test, then, of cynicism, this time the reader’s own.

My earliest reading memory
I remember reading throughout my childhood, but it’s hard to identify my earliest memory of reading. In a lot of ways, it’s as if my childhood began when I learned to read. I do remember taking a copy of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons off the shelf when I was maybe 10 or 11 – far too young to be reading it. I was suitably scandalised and excited by it.

My favourite book growing up
I read a lot of Theodore Dreiser growing up, for reasons that are mysterious to me now. I don’t know how I came to him: he wasn’t assigned in school and no one in my family was reading his books. But his focus was on female characters and perhaps even then, that felt notable. I started with Sister Carrie, then read Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy, but Sister Carrie was the one I returned to again and again.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I was about 12 when I read it and it transformed my understanding of what a story was. That was the first time I understood the capacity of the novel not only to comment on, but to enact social change.

The writer who changed my mind
Almost every writer changes my mind – that is the point of reading.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Kenzaburō Ōe’s A Personal Matter. I was in my mid-20s and my father was dying of cancer. I understood the possibilities of writing differently after I read Ōe, the way it both sat alongside ordinary life but also offered a perch from which to understand it.

The author I came back to
Yasunari Kawabata wasn’t especially easy for me to understand when I was younger. His books are slim, and when I was young they felt tonally almost erratic, both passionate and restrained. Now, I read him and each book seems like a minor miracle.

The book I reread
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. It’s one of those books that contains many different meanings and that seems to shift each time you read it, which is one of the many signs of its greatness.

The book I could never read again
There’s probably no book that I wouldn’t read again. Even a book that I know I wouldn’t enjoy now would still be interesting to read, to figure out how both it and I had changed. And there is always the possibility that I would enjoy it after all. Books are always surprising you.

The author I discovered later in life
Muriel Spark was a relatively late discovery. I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means when I was in my early 20s, and maybe too young to fully appreciate their genius. I’ve been systematically reading my way through the others, from Loitering With Intent and Memento Mori to my personal favourite, The Driver’s Seat. It’s been one of the most satisfying and astonishing reading experiences of my life.

The book I am currently reading
I have been rereading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as well as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

My comfort read
Possibly the same books as in the answer above, but also the entirety of Javier Marias’s work.

At the Café Royal in Regent Street in 1944 three intelligence officers bent over their plates while Europe held its breath. Outside, London braced for D-day. Inside, Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6.

Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6’s counterespionage arm, blinked. Educated at Westminster, converted to communism at Cambridge and by then securely installed as Moscow’s man at the heart of the British establishment, he had helped orchestrate the deception on which Operation Overlord depended, persuading Hitler that the allies would land at Calais rather than Normandy. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion. Yet here he was, strolling off-stage before the curtain rose.

Why? Had Greene glimpsed the treachery across the table? Robert Verkaik circles that question in this elegant and forensic double portrait setting Greene, that sociologist of sin, alongside the Kremlin’s golden boy Philby, with the lengthening shadow of the cold war falling between them.

Greene enters already steeped in divided loyalties. At school in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, he felt caught between the authority of his headteacher father and the contempt of his peers. The sense of standing on the wrong side of the line never left him. He flirted with communism, then with Labour, almost never voted, and cultivated a romantic attraction to all manner of causes.

Risk, however, was his real creed. During the blitz, he gravitated to Soho’s seedier haunts, visiting clip joints and compiling a private catalogue of sex workers. When a Luftwaffe bomb flattened his Clapham house, the Reform Club became his bolt-hole, a place in which the cream of British intelligence and more than a few Soviet agents exchanged gossip over claret. From that upholstered limbo, his absorption into MI6 under Philby followed swiftly enough.

Philby’s doubleness was cooler. Born in India and nicknamed after Kipling’s hero because his first words were in Punjabi, he was the son of Englishman St John Philby, who converted to Islam and advised the Saudi king. Verkaik presents him as a scion of “the British ruling class”, which slightly overstates the case. Philby in fact brushed up against the upper echelons without ever quite belonging to them, and an element of class envy at school and university may well have sharpened his taste for revolution. In time he became, thanks to the clubbable incompetence of intelligence vetting, a trusted insider at MI6, eased through by assurances from his father that the communist phase had been a youthful folly.

Verkaik is helped along by the fact that both his subjects make for terrific copy. Greene, forever dramatising his delinquency, wrote to his longsuffering wife that he was by nature “profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life” – that his infidelities were symptoms of a “disease” which happened also to be his material. Cure the malady and the novelist would vanish. Philby, less confessional but no less carnivorous, had four wives and a flotilla of affairs, conducting treason and matrimony with comparable sangfroid.

Part of the pleasure of Verkaik’s book is the vicarious glide through their parallel rake’s progresses. Yet beneath it all lay something darker. Gambling that Stalin would not double cross his western partners, Philby was quietly funnelling operational details, analyses and, most explosively, material related to D-day planning to Moscow. Had the Kremlin decided to do things differently, the beaches of Normandy could have become a slaughterhouse.

Had Greene guessed, as early as 1944, that his boss was playing a double game? Did his abrupt resignation reflect not disillusionment with office politics, but having caught Philby out? Verkaik asks but does not presume to answer. It would take another two decades for MI5 to catch up and for Philby to defect to the Soviet Union in 1963. However lofty the reasons for his defection, the reality turned out to be more mundane: in Moscow, he was reduced to pestering his handlers for English marmalade and the latest cricket scores from home.

‘May I say that I’m very glad to meet you,”  Woody Brown taps on his word board. Brown is formal, funny and strikingly eloquent. He has a formidable ability to tell stories that reach into the mind of his characters and express what they are thinking, and what they think others are thinking about them. Brown is also autistic and non-speaking.

His first novel, Upward Bound, tells the story of everyday life at the eponymous adult day care centre in southern California. The title is ironic – the young adults, referred to as clients, are anything but upward bound. By and large, they are stifled, patronised, unheard and unseen. Despite their shortcomings, the staff are portrayed with a surprising tenderness.

The story is told from multiple perspectives – Walter, loosely based on Brown, is only understood by his mother; Hollywood-handsome Tom desperately tries to show the neurotypical world that he understands, by blinking; student Ann, who is doing voluntary work to boost her CV, fancies Tom but is blind to the charms of the other clients; Dave, the care centre’s director, really wanted to be an actor, and treats Upward Bound’s annual show like a Broadway production. Brown has created a wonderful portrait of the lives of people destined to be misunderstood by virtually all of us because, as he says, their brain and body are not on speaking terms (pun intended).

Brown, 28, is at home with his mother, Mary, in Los Angeles when we chat. Mary holds up the letter board on which he taps out his answers. She then speaks them back to me. Brown is not totally without speech. Sometimes, he comes out with a word or phrase, often delivered in a high pitch and repeated. This is known as echolalia.

Brown and his mother are incredibly close. She hugs him tight as a blanket when he is stressed, waits patiently for his answers and seems to understand him almost as well as he does himself. “She has been at my side for every moment of my journey,” Brown taps. “Without her there is no me.”

Nobody really knows what makes Brown and other non-speaking autistic people the way they are. But what his family knows for sure is that as a young child he was written off by specialists. His parents were told that he was a lost cause; that there was nothing going on inside. They sensed otherwise. When he was a toddler Mary watched Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose son Tito is autistic and non-speaking, on the TV show 60 Minutes. Mukhopadhyay had taught Tito to type, and now he could communicate with the world. She thought it would be amazing if Woody could learn a fraction of what Tito had. Mary took him to see Mukhopadhyay, who wrote letters on slips of paper and jumbled them up. “I’ve been told he’s mentally retarded, and she says ‘Woody spell cat’. And he pulls down the C and the A and the T. He’s three at that point!”

But it made little difference. When he went to school, teachers dismissed him as a no-hoper, and thought it wasn’t even worth trying to educate him. He was put in the lowest class and left to his own devices. At the age of eight, Mary tells me, the kids in his class were asked if they knew another word for sad. “When it gets to his turn he spells out ‘melancholy’ and he spells it correctly.”

And still it made no difference. The more Brown was misunderstood, the worse his behaviour became. He was bored, angry and disruptive. He threw chairs in class. “I was in the pit of despair,” Brown taps. How did he climb out? “It was a gradual ascent, starting when I was 12 and finally allowed to join the remedial class for lessons,” he taps.

You weren’t even in the remedial class? “I was meant to be in the lowest special ed class, which was so demoralising. At least in the remedial room they tried to teach some basic academics.”

“Sorry boss! Sorry boss!” he shouts in a high-pitched cartoon voice. It’s a shock when you first hear Brown speak.

Is he happy now? “I am very happy now that I have real purpose and productivity. I want this for all autistic people. One of the reasons I wanted to be a great writer was that I wanted neurotypical people to read my book, not out of pity but because it was a good book. That way I can reach the hordes who underestimate and infantilise us, and show them how vivid and magnificent we are.”

Brown is wearing a lovely T-shirt, featuring Japanese trains. I ask him what it means. “I love trains and Murakami. Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author. I’ve read so many of his books. We read every day, and I can’t get enough!” Mary reads aloud to him because he has visuospatial issues that make it difficult to focus on the words on the page.

You have a similar simple, limpid style to Murakami, I say. He smiles. “He’s also not very social like me!” he taps.

Mary asks him a question: “Woody, when you refer to the pit of despair what does that metaphor of the pit mean to you?”

“Murakami always talks about a well, which stands in his books as a metaphor for depression and loneliness,” he taps. “There’s a well in every Murakami book. I think of Murakami’s wells as a visual manifestation of my isolation.”

As he taps, I notice he’s looking away from me. At first I assume he doesn’t like to make eye contact. But then I realise sometimes he looks straight at me, and that he seems to be engaged in an activity when he looks away. I ask what he’s doing.

“May I say I think better when I have my screens going?” Brown says.

Now it’s Mary’s turn to smile. “Should we show Simon?” she asks.

“Yes!!!” he bellows.

There are three computer screens on a mobile cart, and he’s playing or watching each one as we chat – one shows his favourite cartoon, Thomas the Tank Engine, on the second he plays Angry Birds and on the third there are videos of old-school steam locomotives.

I ask him if he’s occupying himself with all the screens because he finds me boring. “No,” he taps. “May I say I have many screens running through my brain at all times. My brain is so busy that I have to occupy more than one channel at a time. If I only looked at you the top of my head might blow right off! It’s exhausting to narrow my vista to one window.”

We have agreed to do the interview in 30-minute bursts because any longer is exhausting for Brown.

“Hey mom, sorry you just don’t understand. You just don’t understand,” he says in the high-pitched voice.

“Do you want a break?” she asks. “Yes,” he says in a deep voice that I assume would be his natural tone.

See you later, I say.

Brown is already walking away with his cart of screens.

“Byyyyyyee. Goodbye Molly,” he says, reverting to the cartoon voice. Mary explains that Molly is a character in Toy Story 3.

---

Half an hour later we reconvene. Brown is newly energised. I ask in what way Upward Bound’s Walter is like him. “Walter is my alter ego. We share aspects of disability and personality.” In what way? “Many aspects of non-speaking autism are shared, particularly the frustration of being misunderstood by most people. I wanted to show how Walter was perceived by the other characters to get a glimpse of how inaccurately others see him. Only his mom is able to translate his verbal nonsense and Walter is lucky to have that one small corner of understanding.”

At one point Walter’s mother invites fellow autistic parent friends over to the house to watch a film about Temple Grandin. Walter hovers in the background watching the film. The portrayal of the autistic animal science professor infuriates him because “this lovely, lithe actress” [Claire Danes] plays her, whereas in real life Grandin is “big and awkward and ugly, in the way that Eleanor Roosevelt was ugly, magnificently ugly”. Walter has an autistic meltdown and puts his hand through a window. “May I say the Temple Grandin chapter is autobiographical.” He shows me his scar.

Your mum seems more fun than Walter’s mum, I say. “She used to be more stressed out,” he taps. “Her behaviour improved as mine did.” Mary is laughing. “Also we have both been working on our anxiety which helps us be nice.” Is anxiety at the core of people with autism? “Anxiety is a constant companion, but I can manage it better now. Meditation has helped greatly.”

Upward Bound’s Tom, for all his beauty, is understood by nobody. “I remember a boy like Tom from childhood, and I have always been concerned about him,” Brown taps. “I worry that no one ever heard him, and that he languishes somewhere alone.” Does he think many autistic people languish unheard? “Oh yes! People put their own ideas on to a blank page that they can’t otherwise read,” he taps.

“Us! Us!” he shouts.

When was the last time you saw him? “Maybe when I was 10.” Was he also Hollywood handsome? “Oh yes! He was gorgeous!”

The person least capable of understanding the clients at Upward Bound is Dave, the director. “Dave is a symbol of well-intended but ultimately self-centred carers who find their way into the land of disability by accident.” Did he have any carers like Dave? “Oh yes!” he taps. “Their voices are louder than the true believers.” What does he mean? “People who get it tend to be more quiet and introspective. They listen more than they need to be heard.”

One person who does get it is Carlos, a carer with a troubled background. “I love Carlos. He is the hero of the story,” he taps.

“Us!” he shouts.

“We’re starting to lose him,” Mary says. We agree to continue tomorrow at 10am.

“I’ve got more to say, but I’m all done now,” Brown taps.

“Wowowoowo! Goodbye James, see you tomorrow,” he says. James is a locomotive in Thomas the Tank Engine.

---

The next day they are five minutes late, and Brown seems a little stressed about it.

“In trouble,” he says repeatedly.

You’re not in trouble with me, I say.

“Sorry boss, sorry boss!” he shouts in the high-pitched cartoon voice.

Mary gives him a deep hug, which settles him.

In 2022, Brown became the first non-speaking autistic graduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received the English department’s top writing honours. He completed his master’s at Columbia University in 2024. Mary attended both courses alongside him. He also took his cart and three screens to his studies. Multitasking was the only way he could focus on lectures and seminars. In his bedroom at home, he has far more screens all going at the same time.

Mary is also an English graduate, and worked for 20 years as a story analyst in the film industry with the likes of Steven Spielberg. Brown’s father Drew is head of production at Paramount TV. Mary anticipates there will be sceptics who suggest that she has helped Brown with his work, but she says she has had nothing to do with the creative process. Sure, she translates Brown’s sentences off the letterboard and then types them up, but apart from checking whether a comma or full stop is needed, and occasionally reminding him he’s used the same word twice in a paragraph, she insists she had no influence over the book.

When you’re with the two of them, this soon becomes apparent. Mary is super smart and good with words. But Brown is super-super smart and brilliant with words. Sometimes she will ask him to explain something because she can’t find the right language. Take trains, for example. Not only is Brown obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine in a childlike way, he also explains the workings of his mind via trains with a concept that could be the basis of a metaphysics PhD. “My mind feels like there are thousands of train lines all running at once, and there are trains on all of them. But they’re not on flat ground, they’re all in 3D. In the universe above me there are all these trains on their tracks just floating around and I’m on all the trains all the time.”

Why do so many autistic people love trains? “Parallel lines and soothing progress,” he taps. But, of course, when there are infinite trains floating in the universe and he’s on every one it’s not so soothing. The trailer to a documentary that has been made about Brown plays out against a horrible shunting and whistling of the railway station from hell.

Is that what you always hear in your head? “My head is so loud that it’s like Grand Central at rush hour. When alone in my room I turn everything, all my screens, to top volume. I drive my parents nuts with the noise. Cacophony is the only word to describe it.” Does that give you relative peace? “Strangely, yes. Mom loves quiet, I love chaos.” Does he really love the chaos or does it enable him to find a relative serenity? “Chaos outside neutralises the chaos inside,” he taps.

You are one complicated dude Woody Brown, I say.

“Sir Topham Hatt!” he shouts in a high pitch.

I ask Brown about the various romances in Upward Bound – all of them unrequited. Walter loves Emma, who is also autistic and non-speaking. He believes, or hopes, he can hear her return his love in her thrumming. “Emma is a real person. My friend since childhood,” he taps. “And I do feel love for her. I know we communicate via autistic energy fields. Our senses are disordered which makes us less attuned to some input and hyper-attuned to others. My childish wish is to find someone who will make a life with me in spite of my shortcomings.”

Why is that childish? “Fabulistic may be a better word. It’s hard for people who are so dependent to have a relationship in real life.”

Could you see yourself living away from your parents? “Yes. They are old, and I will probably survive them. My sister Annie and her husband, Matt, want to share their lives with me when Mom and Dad can’t take care of me any more. They like me. Go figure!”

Well, there’s lots to like about you, I say.

“Locomotives!” he shouts.

Mary talks to me about Brown’s echolalia. She says for so long she thought the words were random. Eventually, she discovered they were a form of shorthand. “Should I tell Simon the story of straight?” she asks him. He nods. “Woody used to watch videos with a blue dog. He still does. I can’t say the name because it stresses him. He’d have a meltdown and he’d say ‘straight’ all the time. How old were you when this was happening?”

“About six,” Woody taps.

“Then I watched him watching the video and the character in the video was trying to hang up a picture, and it was crooked, and he couldn’t get it straight and he was just so frustrated, and when I realised ‘straight’ meant frustration I was like ‘Oh my gosh’. I’d been dismissing these words as nonsense.”

“I use phrases that I can access with my mouth to compensate for all the words my mouth can’t say,” Brown taps.

Autism is currently being demonised by some on the political right in the United States. Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr have referred to the condition as a “disease” and said there is an “epidemic”. How does he feel about that? “May I say that they both distress me terribly. Their words and actions are dangerous.”

In Upward Bound, the carer Ann talks about the clients who can speak but do so constantly and repetitively, concluding that speech is not their superpower, it’s their kryptonite. I ask Brown if he regards his inability to talk as a superpower or kryptonite. Neither, he taps. “My disorder is just that. A disability that says nothing about who I really am. Some people have more strikes against them than others, but we all have things to overcome. Is being non-speaking worse than a child’s fate in Gaza or an immigrant’s destiny on the streets of Minneapolis? How dare I complain from my comfortable home? Perspective is everything.”

Brown is now working on his second novel, Alfie. “It’s a bildungsroman about my search for camaraderie,” he taps. Mary apologises, and says she’s not sure how to pronounce bildungsroman.

“Alfie is a boy in Arkansas who excels at baseball,” Brown taps. Is he autistic? “No, although he hides his anxiety behind his catcher’s mask.”

We’ve been chatting for an hour today. As I say my farewells, I tell Brown how much I love the title Upward Bound. He smiles. “Irony is my middle name,” he taps.

Well Woody Irony Brown, it’s been great talking to you, I say.

“Thank you,” he says. “Byeeeee! Say goodbye Molly.”

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, whose novels, travel writing and translations made him a prominent literary figure in postwar Europe, has died aged 92.

Publishing house De Bezige Bij said in a statement on Wednesday evening that Nooteboom had “passed away very peacefully on his beloved island Menorca”. The statement was made on behalf of the author’s wife, the photographer Simone Sassen.

“We will miss the friendship, erudition, enthusiasm and individuality of this internationally acclaimed writer,” it said.

Nooteboom first made a name for himself in the Netherlands with his 1955 debut novel Philip and the Others. Based on long hitchhiking trips to the Mediterranean and through Scandinavia, it won the Anne Frank prize and became a Dutch literary classic.

He achieved his international breakthrough with his 1980 novel Rituals, about two friends – one of whom breaks rules frequently while the other follows them strictly. The book was turned into a film in 1988 and became his first work to be published in English translation.

Born in The Hague on 31 July 1933, Nooteboom told the Guardian in a 2006 interview that he had no childhood memories until the outbreak of the second world war.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, “we watched on the horizon the glow of Rotterdam burning and I remember being very afraid and having to have cold water thrown in my face to calm me down”.

His father was later killed when a British air raid levelled a residential quarter of The Hague “by mistake”.

Germany was later one of the European countries were Nooteboom’s fiction and travel writing found even greater critical acclaim and commercial success than at home.

As well as writing his own work, Nooteboom translated works from English into Dutch, such as poetry by Ted Hughes and Czesław Miłosz, and the plays of Brendan Behan and Seán O’Casey.

He was awarded honorary doctorates from universities in Brussels, Nijmegen, Berlin and, in 2019, the University College London.

This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The producers of The Traitors were recruiting contestants for 2026, and wanted one of us to take part. Of course they did! The Traitors is a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of the golden age country house whodunnit, which is itself a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of real-life murder. It is crime writers’ job to examine the dark side of human behaviour. Betrayal of trust and manipulation are all in a day’s work. We often write from multiple perspectives, identifying with victim, perp and detective, giving us a unique kind of empathy. We spent the rest of the year wondering who it would be. (I didn’t get the call.)

Last November, in that howling no man’s land between the finale of Celebrity Traitors and the transmission of series four, I went along with 13 fellow crime novelists to the Traitors Live Experience in Covent Garden. Despite being professional pattern-finders with highly tuned powers of observation, none of us at the replica round table guessed that the Chosen One was among us, and had already completed her stint on the real thing.

Harriet Tyce, the barrister turned thriller writer, is perfect for the show, says former detective and bestselling novelist Clare Mackintosh. “The cat-and-mouse game in crime and thriller novels isn’t only between detective and villain, it’s between author and reader – who will reach the truth first? Whether Traitor or Faithful, a crime writer makes a formidable opponent.”

Mark Edwards, Traitors superfan and author of The Wasp Trap, agrees. “When talking to my family about The Traitors I referred to the players as ‘characters’, a slip that proves I watch it in the same way I read crime fiction. Writing crime novels makes us very good at games. That’s why Harriet was able to see that Hugo was a Traitor immediately.”

Ah yes, the takedown that launched a thousand memes. Harriet’s uncloaking of Traitor Hugo in episode three was masterly. It’s one thing to have your suspicions, another to present them convincingly. Her speech was the stuff of the courtroom dramas she writes; eloquent, controlled, incisive. “It has occurred to me from the moment that I found out that you were a barrister that you would be a prime target for the Traitors to take out,” she said, as the nation watched with barely controlled lust. “You have experience at cross-examination, you’re good at presenting your case and you’re highly articulate.” She closed with: “Those are hard facts, as far as I’m concerned.” In Ardross Castle, hard facts are thinner on the ground than protective Shields, but by presenting theory as data, Harriet made sure it became fact. Misdirection is all about delivering near-truths with such panache that the reader doesn’t question it. In a show in which so many banishments are vibes-based (“I’m voting for yourself because you took the last croissant at breakfast”), a novelist’s persuasive skills are powerful.

Harriet is, in Traitors parlance, “playing a blinder”. (We will overlook her misstep with Ross, the most doomed Faithful ever. All good sleuths have a fatal flaw.) I’m not sure writing mysteries automatically qualifies one to excel at the game. We spend most of our time alone, typing and wearing fleeces covered in pet hair. Yes, I practice to deceive, but it takes me months to get those plot twists down on paper. In conversation, I fumble my words and, like Stephen the Traitor, I’m a blusher. That said, authors do develop soft skills that might equip them well for life in the castle. In my time at literary festivals and libraries, I’ve learned how to engage a room of strangers quickly. “To be a successful author you have to be comfortable talking to people and making them like you,” says Edwards. “The players who are good at networking, like Jessie, are far less likely to be banished.”

That’s our suitability for the Faithfuls established, but what of the dark side? “To make twists work,” says Edwards, “we have to be able to create characters who are good at lying and pretending to be good guys. These baddies are always the most fun characters to write, and I think we would all relish the chance to be one of them, if only for a few weeks.”

When we played the Traitors Live, Harriet began as a Faithful but was recruited as a Traitor halfway through the game. If she crosses the floor in the show, the day job will give her further advantage. Crime writers love playing with dramatic irony. We are puppet masters, never happier than when the readers know something the characters don’t. What is that if not the essence of Traitorhood? That, and the inability to resist a chance to make mischief.

• The Night Stairs by Erin Kelly is published by Vintage in July. To support the Guardian, pre-order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

One hundred years of a unique literary rural life will be made available to readers and researchers after the British Library acquired the archive of Ronald Blythe.

The author of Akenfield, a globally bestselling account of a Suffolk village in the throes of the agricultural and social revolution at the end of the 1960s, lived and wrote in East Anglia until his death in 2023 at the age of 100.

As a former librarian who remained firmly in the pre-computer age, Blythe’s papers were found to be immaculately ordered – a million words or more, in neat writing, in humble school workbooks and on index cards.

Even so, curators estimate it will take a year to fully catalogue his archive and better understand the treasures hidden in his books, letters and cards.

“He was so orderly,” said Ian Collins, Blythe’s biographer and literary executor. “When people say ‘archive’ it’s usually another word for ‘muddle’ but with Ronnie you can tell it’s the product of an amazing, self-trained mind.”

Blythe was born in abject poverty, a Suffolk labourer’s son whose family slept on mattresses made of straw. He never went to school or university but taught himself, through reading and friendships with artistic, bohemian rural residents, particularly the artists John and Christine Nash. He published more than 40 books in his lifetime, including social history, fiction, poetry, rural nature writing and essays.

Helen Melody, the lead curator for contemporary literary and creative archives at the British Library, said: “We are delighted to have acquired Ronald Blythe’s archive, which will be a wonderful resource for Blythe scholars and those interested in the societal and cultural changes that Blythe’s work chronicled.”

According to Melody, the archive offers “an amazing insight into the century he lived through because he did a lot of reflecting backwards as well as thinking about contemporary events too”.

Blythe’s papers reveal the depths of his research for Akenfield, which tells the vivid and unvarnished story of a Suffolk village through the voices of its inhabitants, young and old. He writes to the Ministry of Agriculture to obtain records of the cows and geese kept in the village of Charsfield, his model for fictionalised Akenfield, while his index cards show he spoke to hundreds of people, seeking out everyone from otter hunters to commuters to create a kaleidoscopic and authentic account of rural life.

His notebooks show how his interviews were written up immediately afterwards, almost always from memory, according to Collins.

“He listened very, very attentively and he had this incredible memory because he’d been so watchful as a child, and he was very good at catching his interviewees’ voice,” said Collins. “All his books are true but it’s a deeper and broader truth than verbatim. That’s why Akenfield resonates because it’s not just 49 interviews from that period; it’s as though Thomas Hardy was interviewing them. Oral history tells us what people did; Ronnie tells us what people are.”

The archive reveals Blythe’s frugality, with the writer reusing index cards, and paper, and cramming as many neat words as possible into each cheap school notebook. Collins said his habits went to the heart of his “genius” as a writer, too. “It’s so neat because he knows that paper is precious, ink is precious and words are precious. Every word has to work so he’s constantly revisiting and honing it down to get the essence of it all. There’s no waste. He hates waste. You’d think that would make him into a puritan but we know from his life he wasn’t that at all – he was a hedonist.”

Blythe was a hermetic figure who lived alone on the Essex border for most of his life and held a sturdy Anglican faith but Collins’s biography revealed his sociability and uninhibited gay sex life, even in rural East Anglia in an era when homosexuality was outlawed.

This Blythe is found in the archive’s collection of letters from the American novelist Patricia Highsmith. “Ron” and “Pat” struck up an unlikely friendship and even slept with each other on one experimental occasion.

The archive includes letters from fans in the US, where Akenfield was a surprise bestseller, and the occasional critical note, such as a missive from the Earl of Stradbroke who criticised Blythe for the honesty of his depictions of the friction, exploitation and misery in neo-feudal relationships between lords, landowners and farm labourers.

“Those of us whose families have for generations cared for Suffolk are, I am sure you will understand, jealous that its good name should not be smirched,” wrote Stradbroke.

In a characteristically polite but steely reply, Blythe wrote: “Akenfield was never intended to be a public relations exercise for Suffolk but a statement about human nature in the context where I most understood it.”

Collins added: “Ronnie was endlessly kind, endlessly gentle and he’s endlessly tough.

“It’s an important archive for Britain. He was a humble person but he knew his worth and he always said his papers should go to the British Library. It’s such a rich archive, he is a writers’ writer but also the writer for every person – you can recommend Ronald Blythe to anybody.”

For one of Victorian literature’s most distinctive voices, who was once hailed as a genius by Oscar Wilde, very little has been known about Amy Levy for more than a century.

But audiences will now have the opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with a writer whose pioneering work explored women’s independence, Jewish identity and same-sex desire.

The University of Cambridge has announced it has acquired and for the first time unsealed Levy’s personal archive, including letters, draft manuscripts, photographs and diary entries. It is expected the material will inform a wealth of new scholarship on her life, work and mental health.

“It’s rare nowadays for a coherent corpus of a 19th-century author’s papers to come to light,” said John Wells, senior archivist at the Cambridge University Library. “We were determined to take the opportunity to make her archive available in the place where she studied and where she visited even in the last months of her life.”

Levy was born in 1861 into a middle-class Jewish family in London and entered Newnham College in 1879, becoming only the second Jewish woman among Cambridge’s first generation of female students.

She wrote three poetry collections, three novels – including Reuben Sachs and The Romance of a Shop – numerous essays and a series of articles for the Jewish Chronicle. When she died by suicide in 1889, aged 27, she was recognised by her contemporaries as an exceptional talent, with Wilde writing her obituary and commending the “sincerity, directness, and melancholy” of her work.

The newly available collection – which until now was owned by a private corporation – offers a vivid portrait of the intellectual and social circles that shaped Levy’s writing, from the early feminist New Woman movement to the cultural debates surrounding race science, art and identity in Victorian-era Britain.

Linda K Hughes, professor emerita of English and the Addie Levy professor of literature at Texas Christian University, who is working on a book project about Levy, said she believed the documents would not only transform academic study but also be of interest to a wider public.

“I read Amy’s poetry decades ago and they have haunted me ever since,” Hughes said. “Not only was she a fine and evocative writer, but she was also so complex. She affirmed her Jewish identity, but she was also an atheist. She seemed to get along very well with men, but she was a queer woman.”

Hughes said Levy had built a social network at Newnham and also in her later years, especially through Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget) “who was well connected to everybody including Wilde. Levy entered Lee’s circle, in fact she fell in love with her, a love that unfortunately was never returned.

“When Wilde received a one-page manuscript from Levy for his magazine the Woman’s World, he was bowled over by the story and called Levy a girl of genius.”

Researchers believe Levy’s work speaks directly to contemporary conversations around feminism, LGBTQ+ literature and Jewish identity and say she foreshadowed debate that would come long after her death.

“She was ahead of her time, which was perhaps one of the reasons she never entirely found her niche,” Hughes said. “She struggled with queer identity and how she fit into a heteronormative society. Marriage was not an option for her, but neither was having a career like a school teacher, which she abandoned to become a writer full-time.

“She has long been interesting to people who study Jewish women and their history. And today, when we have in the wake of the global pandemic so many young people struggling with depression, anxiety, troubled psyches, even suicidality, understanding her might be of interest and solace to a wider public too,” Hughes said.

The collection includes Levy’s 1889 appointment diary, in which increasingly sparse entries trace the last months before her death from inhaling carbon monoxide. A final, moving entry, written the day before she died, said: “Alone at home all day.” But Hughes said Levy in many ways had “a rich, full, exciting existence” too.

“She could be humorous at times, which shows in her writings. She did suffer from a trifecta of challenges, including neuralgia. She was growing increasingly deaf, which leads to social alienation and isolation. And she also suffered from depression.

“Though she never quite found happiness, it was always something she insisted on: the right to be happy, even ecstatic.”

As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest “what if?” questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the famous Covent Garden theatre actor-manager George Bartley seeking an audition, saying he believed he “had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others”.

Bartley responded saying they were producing “the Hunchback” and arranging an appointment. Dickens planned to take his sister, Fanny, to accompany him singing on the piano.

Then Dickens fell ill “with a terrible bad cold” and missed the audition. By the time the next season came around he had embarked on the parliamentary reporter job that would firmly set him on his path to novelist. Would the world have been deprived of his literary canon but for the timing of that cold?

Yet Dickens never abandoned his love of theatre, which is examined in detail in a new exhibition, “Showtime!”, opening on 23 July at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, highlighting his fondness of drama and the dramatic impact of his works.

It was evident in how he constructed stories, published as weekly serials with a cliffhanger.

In public readings he would physically act out episodes on tours around Britain and America. His most famous one, of the gruesome murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, was so intense it is said it contributed to his death, aged 58, in 1870.

The dramatic quality of his stories has lent them easily to innumerable adaptations over two centuries, from those brazenly pirated by the Victorian dramatist Edward Stirling at the Adelphi in London during Dickens’s lifetime to The Muppets Christmas Carol in 1992.

The actor Simon Callow, who has played many Dickensian characters on stage and screen, said: “Performing was central to Dickens’s life from a very early age. His father used to take him as a five-year-old to the local pub where he would recite and sing.

“Perhaps the pivotal moment of his life was his cancellation because of illness of an audition with the greatest actor-manager of his day. Instead he took a job as a parliamentary reporter and then the course of his life was set.”

But Dickens never stopped writing, directing and performing plays, said Callow, a patron of the museum. “All this came to a head in the public readings, which he performed for massive and astounded audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.”

One such astounded spectator was Mark Twain, who wrote of one Dickens reading of a “spry, (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds … the very Dickens came! He did not emerge upon the stage – that is rather too deliberate a word – he strode.”

Emma Harper, the exhibition’s curator, said: “I don’t think many are aware of the extent of Dickens’s theatricality. And particularly that ‘sliding doors’ moment. I don’t know had he gone into acting as his main career whether writing would have been that side hustle for him. It’s a great ‘what if?’.”

Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster of the missed audition: “See how near I may have been, to another sort of life.” He said he still thought of the theatre. “I begin to be once more of opinion that nature intended me for the Lessee of a National Theatre – and that pen ink and paper have spoiled a (Theatre) Manager.”

Harper said: “His drama comes through. We have his reading copies where he is taking his own work, he’s editing it, he’s striking through on the book, glueing pages together, highlighting, writing in his own stage directions to make it as dramatic as possible.”

He said Dickens’s daughter Mamie, telling of watching him work, “describes how he jumps up from his desk, goes towards the nearest mirror and he acts out what he’s just written; he does all the faces, the voices and then he rushes back to the desk to write it back down again, so to check that his description matches what he wants his audience to experience.”

The exhibition, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, explores 200 years of performances of Dickens’s stories, from his own edited reading copies to letters, posters, playbills, programmes, photographs and props. Yes, and even including from the Muppets. “Can’t do this without the Muppets!” said Harper.