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"If we are looking for books of the epic scale and stature of the great European 19th-century novels, we must turn to Asia." David Parker is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Man Asian Literary Prize. More...
Wednesday, 7 December, 2011
In the midst of writing his second novel, Tod Wodicka examines the trend for the literary doorstopper. Some are markedly weightier than others. More...
Monday, 7 November, 2011
Kavita Bhanot was born to a Punjabi family in Plumstead. Her anthology of short stories, from a new generation of British Asian writers, began with a question: what happens when writers are given the freedom to be writers, regardless of colour or religion; to write about what they want, how they want? More...
Tuesday, 4 October, 2011
Helon Habila, a Nigerian novelist and poet, won the Caine Prize for African fiction in 2001, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2003. The Granta Book of the African Short Story, edited by Habila introduces 'the post-nationalist generation' of African writers. More...
Monday, 5 September, 2011
Charles McLeod's fiction has appeared in a multitude of publications. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Hoyns Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and San Jose State University, where he was a Steinbeck Fellow. American Weather, the savage take-down of modern America, is his first novel. More...
Thursday, 4 August, 2011
Time Out labelled James Miller 'London's Rising Star 2008' following publication of his critically applauded The Lost Boys. His latest Sunshine State, is a futuristic dystopian satire. More...
Tuesday, 5 July, 2011
Historian Stella Tillyard, whose previous books include Aristocrats on the lives of the Lennox sisters and A Royal Affair about George III and his siblings, has been described by Simon Schama as "dazzling... a phenomenally gifted writer". Her first novel, Tides of War, has just been published. More...
Tuesday, 24 May, 2011
Reinvention and respect for the past inform the latest crop of literary and culture magazines, says Anna Goodall. More...
Thursday, 21 April, 2011
Camilla Gibb's novels have been translated into fourteen languages. Her latest, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, is set in contemporary Vietnam which required much reading of her own around the subject. She writes about the art of research and how to avoid falling under the influence of others... More...
Thursday, 24 March, 2011
Sarah Moss is a British writer and academic. She is the Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Exeter. Inspired by her own pregnancy, Moss looked into the literature of maternity. Night Waking, her second novel, is about maternal ambivalence. More...
Thursday, 24 February, 2011
Adam Mars-Jones shares the appeal of inlaid jewels in literature. More...
Thursday, 20 January, 2011
Only a superior beast of burden can find happiness in a burst balloon, argues Cornelius Medvei. More...
Monday, 20 December, 2010
Human speech existed for about 95,000 years before we thought to write anything down. Not content to use our new skill to record and report, the art of invention took wing. David Bellos celebrates the art of the literary hoax from Plato to the present. More...
Thursday, 25 November, 2010
Harry Ricketts examines how Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and other poets of the Great War ignited imaginations and redefined how we think of both war and literature. More...
Friday, 29 October, 2010
Literature is considered a solitary enterprise, for both writer and reader. But words are for speaking as much as they are for reading, and when we give them breath we give them life. Blake Morrison argues the case for reading aloud. More...
Thursday, 23 September, 2010
Jonathan Dee's latest novel The Privileges opens with a wedding, told from the point of view of several of the guests, the baton passing from one to another before alighting on his main characters. Here, he explores other novels that experiment with point of view and finds that who dares, wins. More...
Thursday, 5 August, 2010
The novel is alive and kicking, despite reports to the contrary, but should writers be turning their talents to more pressing concerns, asks Michael Byers. More...
Thursday, 24 June, 2010
In her novel The Lessons, Naomi Alderman tells the story of a group of friends at Oxford from the perspective of two men. Here, she considers literary ventriloquism and the transformative thrill of writing in a male tongue, from Patricia Highsmith's Ripley to Elizabeth Knox's angel Xas. More...
Friday, 7 May, 2010
Alex Preston studied English at Oxford before embarking on a career in the hedge fund industry. He started writing his debut novel This Bleeding City just before the credit crunch took hold of the global economy. Here he traces how fiction has responded to financial crisis, from Zola to Amis. More...
Tuesday, 30 March, 2010
David Shields' new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, calls on writers, artists and all working in the creative fields to be ever more mindful of reality in their work. In an increasingly manafactured world, he argues, it is the unadorned truth that must take precedent in the arts. Here he chooses a selection of books that have been stripped of artifice and lay bare their essential message. More...
Thursday, 25 February, 2010
Set against London's creaking financial industry in the autumn of 2008, Henry Sutton's novel Get Me Out of Here holds a mirrror up to city greed in the noughties. Here he traces the rise and fall of money men in fiction, from Jay Gatsby to Patrick Bateman. More...
Wednesday, 27 January, 2010
2009 was the year that saw the demise of Borders, the deaths of John Updike and Frank McCourt, the wrath of Alain de Botton and the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford professor of poetry. We asked some leading writers and poets for their highs and lows of the last twelve months in literature. More...
Tuesday, 22 December, 2009
For centuries, London has fed literature with some of our most enduring stories. Home to Shakespeare, Dickens and Pepys, and now to Sandhu, Self and Sinclair, Rebecca Yolland explores a capital history of words. More...
Thursday, 19 November, 2009
Hog-butcher to the world, hardscrabble city on the make, Chicago is experiencing a literary renaissance. The loose, talky style of the city¹s best writers has been reinterpreted by a whole new generation of novelists, poets and memoirists, finds Granta editor JOHN FREEMAN. More...
Monday, 12 October, 2009
BBC World Affairs correspondent HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY considers how our notions of democracy inform and obscure foreign policy, and explores the impact of failed and violent states in fiction and reportage. More...
Monday, 7 September, 2009
Language is one of the few realms we have jurisdiction over as children, and where we first learn to test the limits and lengths of our power, finds poet and novelist JACOB POLLEY
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Monday, 20 July, 2009
ALAIN DE BOTTON, author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, champions those pessimistic philosophers who relish the banalities of life and embrace its imperfections.
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Tuesday, 7 April, 2009
KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Burnt Shadows, finds an affinity for the literary sleight of hand of Michael Ondaatje and Ali Smith. More...
Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
IAIN SINCLAIR has been charting London's forgotten corners for decades, bearing witness to the ebb and flow of development and its fast fading histories. His new book about Hackney is a hymn to the changing East End and its importance as an archive. He traces its progress through previous generations of Hackney writers. More...
Monday, 9 February, 2009
Islands have long provided the perfect microclimate for the novel, concentrating the action, testing character and contending with nature. SAM TAYLOR's new novel The Island at the End of the World updates this idea, and gives it a contemporary bite. He examines a rich thread of islands novels from Shakespeare to Huxley. More...
Tuesday, 13 January, 2009
Literature provides us with some of our most enduring visions of Christmas, from the Bible to A Christmas Carol, but it needn't stop at Dickens. The festive season, with all it's conflict, family drama and high emotion, is ripe territory for modern fiction. Christmas on the page needn't be all snowflakes and rosy cheeks to conjure a little Christmas Spirit, finds VIOLA FORT. More...
Monday, 8 December, 2008
SARA MAITLAND takes us on a tour of the natural world on her bookshelf, from Robert Macfarlane's book on mountains, Paul Davies' exploration of the universe and Ken and Rod Preston-Mafham's ode to the 'pyschology of invertebrates'. More...
Thursday, 6 November, 2008
Every so often SUSIE BOYT finds a book that fills her with passion and kindles a sense of kinship between her and the author. From Henry James' In the Cage to Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, these are the books that inspire hero worship and drive her to write.
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Thursday, 2 October, 2008
RON CURRIE, author of his own gripping, artful and often amusing apocalytpic vision God Is Dead, takes us on a journey to the end of time, from the sci-fi of Kurt Vonnegut to the good old zombie yarn of Max Brooks.
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Friday, 5 September, 2008
The Iliad is one of the most enduring and emblematic stories history has ever given us. ADAM FOULDS, author of the remarkable narrative poem Broken Word, traces its subject - the Trojan War - through centuries of literature and finds the rich cluster of stories it spurned endure into the present day.
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Friday, 1 August, 2008
REBECCA ABRAMS' new novel Touching Distance tells the story of a brilliant but largely unrecognised doctor working in 18th century Aberdeen. Here she talks about the books, from writers as diverse as Hilary Mantel and Mikhail Bulgakov, which provided her with both a model and an inspiration.
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Friday, 4 July, 2008
STEVE TOLTZ, author of A Fraction Of The Whole, was recently named at The Hay Festival as 21 of the most exciting writers of the moment. He writes of living in Barcelona and Paris, about the peculiar freedom of writing away from home and those, including John Fowles and Henry Miller, who have found the same.
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Friday, 6 June, 2008
TOM COGHLAN, The Economist's man in Afghanistan, on why the best war reportage is seldom about the fighting itself. More...
Thursday, 24 April, 2008
