Aniefiok Ekpoudom talks to Neil Denny about his debut book Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kiley Reid talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Come And Get It. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sigrid Nunez talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel The Vulnerables. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kate Brody talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel Rabbit Hole. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ron Rash talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel The Caretaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

in the first show of 2024, Jonathan Lethem joins Neil Denny to talk about his new book Brooklyn Crime Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dann McDorman talks to Nei Denny abouty his debut novel West Heart Kill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julianne Pachico returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Jungle House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Linguist Rob Drummond talks to Neil Denny about his new book You're All Talk: why we are what we speak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anne Michaels talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Held. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jean Kwok joins Neil Denny to talk about her latest novel The Leftover Woman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike McCormack talks to Neil Denny about his "metaphysical noir" novel This Plague of Souls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former US Congressman and Democratic presidential nomination candidate Beto O'Rourke talks to Neil Denny about his book We've Got To Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Gillett talks to Neil Denny about his new book Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A.K. Blakemore talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel The Glutton. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Biles talks to Neil Denny about his Animal Farm sequel Beasts of England. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sandra Newman talks to Neil Denny about her new novel Julia, which retells 1984 from Julia's perspective. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cat Jarman retrurns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her new book The Bone Chests: Unlocking The Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paleontologist Michael J. Benton talks to Neil about his latest book Extinction: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil is joined by Robert Peckham to talk about his book Fear: An Alternative History of the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil is on holiday so here's a repeat of our interview from earlier this year with Isabella Hammad talking about her novel Enter Ghost. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elizabeth Acevedo talks to Neil Denny about her first novel for adults, Family Lore. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Caspar Henderson talks to Neil Denny about his new book, A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francis Spufford returns to Little Atoms and talks to neil Denny about his latest novel, the alternative history Cahokia Jazz. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gina Chung talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel Sea Change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Haynes returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil Denny about her latest non-fiction book Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jamel Brinkley talks to Neil Denny about his latest short story collection Witness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil welcome's back Lauren Groff to Little Atoms to talk about her latest novel The Vaster Wilds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Stubbs returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Different Times: A History of British Comedy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yiyun Li returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil Denny about her new collection of stories Wednesday's Child. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Travel writer Nick Hunt talks to Neil Denny about his debut novel Red Smoking Mirror. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Khashayar J. Khabushani talks to Neil Denny about his debut novel I Will Greet The Sun Again. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Penguin Press publishing director Simon Winder talks to Neil Denny about the recent revival of Penguin Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel Connolly talks to Neil Denny about her Belfast set debut novel Lazy City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Morris talks to Neil Denny about his new "suite of stories" Open Up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Funder talks to Neil about the life of George Orwell's wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy in her new book Wifedom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

V. V. Ganeshananthan in conversation with Neil Denny about her latest novel Brotherless Night. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Lippman returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her latest novel Prom Mom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kate Mosse talks to Neil about her latest novel, the third book in her Joubert Family Chronicles quartet, the Ghost Ship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Murray talks to Neil about his latest novel The Bee Sting, which was recently long-listed for the 2023 Man Booker prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charles Frazier talks to Neil about his Great Depression set novel The Trackers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mikki Brammar talks to Neil about her debut novel The Collected Regrets of Clover. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patrick deWitt returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about his latest novel The Librarianist. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark O'Connell returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about his latest book A Thread of Violence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Cumming returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her latest book Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Una Mannion talks to Neil about her latest novel Tell Me What I Am. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Ford talks to Neil about his fifth and final Frank Bascombe novel Be Mine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen Buoro talks to Neil about his Nigeria set debut novel The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

K. Patrick talks to Neil about their debut novel Mrs S. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kevin Brazil talks to Neil about his essay collection Whatever Happened To Queer Happiness? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Octavia Bright talks to Neil about her memoir of recovery and renewal This Ragged Grace. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Natasha Calder about her new novel Whether Violent or Natural. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kristen Ghodsee talks to Neil about her latest book Everyday Utopia: In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Dederer talks to Neil about her latest book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Blessin Adams talks to Neil Denny about her book Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mat Osman tells Neil about his latest novel The Ghost Theatre. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Margot Douaihy talks to Neil about her New Orleans set debut novel Scorched Grace. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Isabella Hammad talks to Neil about her latest novel Enter Ghost. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Magee talks to Neil about his Belfast set debut novel Close To Home. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jaime Green talks to Neil about her new book The Possibility Of Life, longlisted for the Women's Prize Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sheena Patel talks to Neil about her debut novel I'm A Fan, which is longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Claire Fuller about her latest novel The Memory of Animals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cecile Pin talks to Neil about her debut novel Wandering Souls, which is longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dizz Tate talks to Neil about her debut novel Brutes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tara M. Stringfellow talks to Neil about her debut novel Memphis, which has been longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. (Content Warning: reading contains some racial slurs). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Porter talks to Neil about his latest novel Shy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Booker prize wiining novellist Eleanor Catton about her long awaited new novel Birnam Wood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oliver Milman talks to Neil about his book The Insect Crisis, out now in paperback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Fiona McFarlane about her Australian outback set novel The Sun Walks Down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alice Winn talks to Neil about her WWI set debut novel In Memoriam. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ann-Helén Laestadius talks to Neil about her novel Stolen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kevin Jared Hosein talks to Neil about his 1940's Trinidad set novel Hungry Ghosts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Sophie Mackintosh about her latest novel Cursed Bread. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Santanu Bhattacharya about his debut novel One Small Voice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Harding talks to Neil about his latest novel This Other Eden. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Hannaham talks to Neil about his Ulysses influenced novel Didn't Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta, about a trans woman returning after 23 years in prison to a gentrified Brooklyn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Escoffery talks to Neil about his debut collection of stories If I Survive You. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Jan Grue about I Live A Life Like Yours, his memoir about disability, difference, and living as a vulnerable body. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aleksandar Hemon talks to Neil about his latest novel The World And All That It Holds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Purcell talks to Neil about her latest gothic novel The Whispering Muse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gavin Plumley takes us into the Herefordshire countryside in his new book A Home For All Seasons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Victoria MacKenzie talks to Neil about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, in her debut novel for Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on my Little Pain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the 800th Little Atoms, and Bret Easton Ellis returns to the show to talk to Neil about his first novel in thirteen years, The Shards. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Ames returns to Little Atoms to talk about his latest novel The Wheel of Doll. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the first show of 2023, Neil talks to Matt Lodder about his new book Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the last show of 2022, Michael Pedersen on male friendship in his new book Boyfriends. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jessamine Chan talks to Neil about her debut novel The School For Good Mothers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil hears tales from medieval Britain with Amy Jeffs and her new book Wild. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dorthe Nors returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her latest book A Line In The World: A Year On The North Sea Coast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Katherine Rundell talks to Neil about her latest book The Golden Mole. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Camper English talks about the long relationship between medicine and alcohol in his new book The Perfect Tonic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kathryn Harkup talks to Neil about the science of James Bond in her new book Superspy Science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Morden talks to Neil about his new book The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jarett Kobek returns to Little Atoms for an extra long episode He talks to Neil about two books, Motor Spirit and How To Find Zodiak. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hannah Bourne-Taylor talks to Neil about her memoir Fledgling. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joyce Carol Oates returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her latest novel Babysitter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adrian Chiles joins Neil to talk about moderating his alcohol intake, in his new book The Good Drinker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Williams talks to Neil about his new book Lost Realms: Histories of Britain From The Romans to The Vikings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Clare Pollard talks to Neil about her debut novel Delphi. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yiyun Li talks to Neil about her latest novel The Book of Goose. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ned Beauman talks to Neil about his latest novel Venomous Lumpsucker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Saunders returns to Little Atoms, to talk to Neil about his first collection of short stories in a decade, Liberation Day. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brenna Hassett talks to Neil about the evolution of childhood, in her new book Growing Up Human. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to James Crawford about Borders and his new book The Edge Of The Plain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A.M. Homes talks to Neil about her first novel in a decade, The Unfolding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Celeste Ng returns to Little Atoms to talk to Neil about her latest novel Our Missing Hearts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Rebecca Stott about her post-Roman Londinium set novel Dark Earth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Kamila Shamsie about her Karachi and London set new novel Best of Friends. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Harris talks to Neil about Act Of Oblivion, his new novel set in colonial America in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrea Wulf talks to Neil about her new book Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Natalie Haynes about her latest novel Stone Blind, which tells the story of Medusa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's show Neil talks to Will Ashon about his new book The Passengers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miranda Seymour talks to Neil about her new biography of Jean Rhys: I Used To Live Here Once. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maggie O'Farrell talks to Neil about her long-awaited new novel The Marriage Portrait. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gaia Vince talks to Neil about her new book Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Neil talks to artist Tom de Freston about his new book Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea, which explores Tom's obession with Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and it's influence on his own practice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mohsin Hamid returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about his latest novel The Last White Man. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Natasha Pulley about her Cold War set novel the Half Life of Valery K. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Niamh Mulvey talks to Neil about her debut short story collection Hearts & Bones: Loves Songs For Late Youth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead talks to Neil about his latest book Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Churchwell talks to Neil about her new book The Wrath To Come: Gone With The Wind And The Lies America Tells. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil is joined by the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop Lan Samantha Chang to talk about her latest novel The Family Chao, a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov set in a Midwestern Chinese restaurant. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nell Stevens returns to Little Atoms to talk to Neil about her debut novel Briefly, A Delicious Life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Polley talks to Neil about her essay collection Run Towards The Danger: Confrontations With A Body of Memory. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Runcie tells the story of Bach's creation of the St Matthew Passion in his latest novel The Great Passion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Vincent talks to Neil about the revolutionary roots of the metric system in his new book Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie Haydock talks to Neil about the women of Egon Schiele in her debut novel The Flames. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Louise Kennedy talks to Neil about her debut novel Trespasses, and her short story collection The End of The World is a Cul de Sac, which is just out in paperback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matthew Green talks to Neil about his book Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The second of two shows with shortlisted writers for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize, With Marc David Baer (The Ottomans), Francesca Stavrakopoulou (God: An Anatomy) and Nicholas Orme (Going To Church in Medieval England). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first of two shows with shortlisted writers for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. In this show Neil talks to Malcolm Gaskill (The Ruin of All Witches) and Clare Jackson (Devil-Land). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the 750th Little Atoms, here's a short interview with legendary film-maker John Waters about his debut novel Liarmouth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Karen Joy Fowler talks to Neil about her latest novel Booth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave talks to Neil about her latest novel The Dance Tree. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Grindrod takes us on a journey around the landmark buildings of contemporary Britain in his new book Iconicon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks smuggling and rebellion with Alex Preston in his new novel Winchelsea. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Miranda Cowley Heller about her debut novel The Paper Palace. (Contains some discussion of writing about sexual abuse). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil has been waiting for 20 years to talk to Louise Welsh about her latest novel The Second Cut. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Lisa Harding about her novel Bright Burning Things, which is just out in paperback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil will return from holiday eventually, but meanwhile why not listen to another deep cut from the Little Atoms archive, this week Matthew Baker talks about his short shory collection Why Visit America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil is still on holiday so here's another hit from the Little Atoms archive, Jarett Kobek on his novel Only Americans Burn In Hell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil is on holiday so please enjoy from the Little Atoms archive Sarah Churchwell on her book Behold America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laurie Winkless talks to Neil about all things Sticky (and slippery) in her new book Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Will Storr talks to Neil about his new book The Status Game. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' about her epic debut novel The Love Songs Of W.E.B Du Bois. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Booker Prize winner Marlon James talks to Neil about the second novel in his fantasy trilogy Moon Witch Spider King. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sequoia Nagamatsu talks to Neil about his billion-year spanning debut novel How High We Go In The Dark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Julie Bindel about how equality is not the same as liberation, in her new book Feminism for Women. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to John Banville about his latest two crime novels April in Spain and Snow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to award-winning comedy writer Georgia Pritchett about her adventures in anxiety, in her memoir My Mess Is A Bit Of A Life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Padraig chats to Harper's and n+1 critic Christine Smallwood about "adjunct lit", therapists, the end of the world, and her debut novel The Life Of The Mind Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Brooks talks to Neil about how maths underpins the rise of civilisation in his new book The Art of More. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Oyeyemi talks to Neil about her latest novel Peaces. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The New Yorker's Music critic Kelefa Sanneh talks to Neil about his new book Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the last Little Atoms of 2021, Judy Golding talks to Neil about her father William Golding, on the republication by Faber of The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rebecca Donner talks to Neil about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack and her part in the German Reistance to Hitler, in her new book All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Chivers joins Neil to talk about walking the historical strata of London and it's hidden rivers, in his new book London Clay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Nickolas Butler about his latest novel Godspeed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Ruth Ozeki about her latest novel The Book of Form & Emptiness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Qian Julie Wang talks to Neil about growing up hungry and afraid in America as an undocumented migrant, in her new memoir Beautiful Country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Standage talks to Neil about his new book A Short History Of Motion, from who invented the wheel to self-driving cars. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Monisha Rajesh, author of Around The World in 80 Trains, talks to Neil about how her obsession with train travel began, puts up a hearty defence of Amtrak, and tells of her travels to North Korea. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mary Roach talks to Neil about house-breaking bears and monkey muggers in her new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks The Law. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexandra Kleeman talks to Neil about her latest novel Something New Under The Sun. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jackie Higgins talks to Neil about what the amazing senses of animals from the cheetah to the octopus can tell us about our own senses in her new book Sentient. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks talks to Neil about his latest novel Snow Country, set in Austria between the wars, the second novel of an Austrian trilogy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Geoff Dyer talks to Neil about SEE/SAW his latest collection of essays on looking at photographs. Yes we talk about lots of photographs on an audio podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cultural critic Travis Elborough talks to Neil about the history an cultural impact of spectacles in his latest book Through The Looking Glasses. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Groff returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her latest novel Matrix, a meticulously recreated historical fiction set in a 12th century abbey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julianne Pachico talks to Neil about her Colombia set debut novel The Anthill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joyce Carol Oates talks to Neil about her latest novel Breathe, "a memoir that has been reimagined as a work of fiction" about grief. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ece Temelkuran returns to Little Atoms to tell Padraig about Together: Ten Choices for a Better Now, the sequel to the global hit How To Lose A Country. Ece discusses how criticism replaced action, the role of the exile, and the radical proposition of trust. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into 54 languages. Shafak's last novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. She talks to Neil about her latest novel The Island of Missing Trees, set in Cyprus during the partition and contemporary London, and featuring a rather unusual narrator. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen Walker talks to Neil about the 60th annversary of Yuri Gagarin's incredible journey into space in his new book Beyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jean Hanff Korelitz talks to Neil about her latest novel The Plot, which centers around the literary world and the contested ownership of the right to tell a story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julian Sancton on his new book Madhouse at the End of the Earth, and incredible survival story of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Lippman talks to Neil about the gentrification of Baltimore and using elements of the horror genre in her new novel Dream Girl, and of writing about herself in her essay collection My Life as a Villainess. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brandy Schillace tells Neil the incredible story of Dr Robert White and his quest to perform the first head transplant. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Spitzer talks to Neil about his new history of the world through the evolution of music, The Musical Human. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alice Bell talks to Neil about her history of climate change, Our Biggest Experiment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to optogenetics pioneer Karl Deisseroff about the work of his Stanford lab, and about his new book Connections: A Story of Human Feeling. Also contains Karl's wind-chimes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephanie Scott talks to Neil about her debut novel What's Left Of Me Is Yours. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex von Tunzelmann is a bestselling author, screenwriter, broadcaster, and media commentator. Her latest book is Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History. Inspired by the toppling of the Edward Colson statue in Bristol, Alex tackles the bad faith arguments of the culture warriors head on, talking about some historical examples of other statues around the world that have fallen from favour. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scott Weidensaul is one of the most respected natural history writers in the country. Among the more than 30 books he's written are Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His latest book is A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the 700th episode of Little Atoms, and writer and filmmaker Jonathan Meades returns for the tenth time to talk to Neil about his new collection of journalism Pedro and Ricky Come Again. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London, and a fellow contributor to Resonance FM. She is the author of Trans: A Memoir, and now a collection of short stories Variations, which uses "found" documents and real-life events to rewrite and reinvigorate a history of transgender Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks to Cherie Jones about her Women's Prize shortlisted debut novel How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, and to Kate Mosse about the Women's Prize Trust Discoveries programme. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natasha Pulley talks to Neil about time travel, slavery and the UK under French occupation in her latest novel The Kingdoms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Ames talks to Neil about A Man Named Doll, the first in a series of detective novels about "A troubled man, aged 50", as coincidentally Neil is this week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Clare Chambers talks to Neil about her Women's Prize 2021 longlisted novel Small Pleasures, about repressed love and parthenogenesis in the South East London suburbs. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tabitha Lasley talks to Neil about her first book Sea State, a study of masculinity in the oil industry, which becomes an accidental memoir when she becomes to close to her story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philip Hoare returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about his fascination with Albrecht Dürer, and Dürer's fascination with painting a whale in his new book Albert & The Whale. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Scales returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about exploring the deep oceans, how creatures survive the great depths, and how human activity threatens even the deepest places in her new book The Brilliant Abyss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Higham talks to Neil about the hunt for the Denisovans, and our other hominid ancestors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Fuller talks to Neil about her 2021 Women's Prize shortlisted fourth novel Unsettled Ground. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Cat Jarman talks to Neil about how an Indian Carnelian bead ends up in a Viking grave in Derbyshire, in her new history of the Vikings, River Kings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Una Mannion talks to Neil about her debut novel A Crooked Tree. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Power talks to Neil about Russian oligarchs, paranoia and the ethics of using real life in fiction, in his debut novel A Lonely Man. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born and raised in Canada, Sarah Leipciger lives in London with her three children, and teaches creative writing to prisoners. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Asham Award, the Fish Prize and the Bridport Prize. Her first novel, the critically acclaimed The Mountain Can Wait, was published in 2015. Coming Up For Air is her second novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Little Atoms' favourite GP Gavin Francis returns to talk about his new book Intensive Care, which details his experiences of Covid 19. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley talk to Neil about their new book Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sam Byers is the author of Idiopathy (2013) and Perfidious Albion (2018). He talks to Neil about ideas of freedom, wellness and degradation in his new novel Come Join Our Disease. NB: For some reason Neil's end sounds like he was recorded at the bottom of a well, but Sam sounds fine and that's the main thing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melanie Challenger talks to Neil about her new book How To Be Animal, which combines popular science, history and moral philosophy in a wide-ranging and radical new take on the human story and what it means for us today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jess Walter talks to Neil about his new novel The Cold Millions, which features union organising, riots and the suppression of protest. Set in Spokane in 1909, but seemingly ripped out of today's headlines. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Courttia Newland is the author of The Scholar, Snakeskin and The Gospel According to Cane. He co-edited The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, and his short stories have featured in various anthologies. He talks to Neil about working with Steve McQueen on Little Axe, and about taking 20 years to write his multiverse spanning, world decolonising novel A River Called Time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Author of Homegoing Yaa Gyasi talks to Neil about the American opioid epidemic, finding meaning through both faith and science, and growing up in Alabama in her latest novel Transcendent Kingdom, which is long-listed for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. Featuring an appearance by Yaa's dog. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Kat Arney talks about how cancer breaks the rules, via naked mole rats, nazi scientists and chimney sweep's scrotums in her new book Rebel Cell. See her website for more details: https://www.rebelcellbook.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the week of St Patrick's Day Neil talks to the current Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry on the paperback release of his latest novel A Thousand Moons. Sebastian talks about finding his family through fiction, and how an Arshile Gorky painting, a pet dog, the writings of Peter Matthiessen and watching RuPaul's Drag Race all influenced Days Without End and A Thousand Moons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned both his B.F.A. in creative writing and M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Essence and The Paris Review. He is the creator of the social justice social media community, Son of Baldwin. He talks to Neil about his debut novel The Prophets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rebecca Watson talks to Neil about her debut novel little scratch, which was published recently to critical acclaim. She is one of The Observer’s 10 best debut novelists of 2021. Watson writes for publications including the TLS, Granta and the Guardian, and is part-time Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francis Spufford returns to Little Atoms to talk to Neil about his new novel Light Perpetual. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and a professor of physics and planetary science at MIT. She talks about her new memoir The Smallest Lights in the Universe, about juggling being a MacArthur award winning astrophysicist with being a widowed single-mother, and brings Neil up to speed with the latest news in the hunt for exo-planets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Porter is the author of Lanny, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the recipient of the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award. He talks to Neil about painting with words in his latest book The Death of Francis Bacon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. She talks to Neil about ideas of motherhood, ethical surgery, the politically fraught concept of detransitioning and what trans women and divorced cis women have in common in her debut novel Detransition, Baby. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cal Flyn, author of the memoir Thicker Than Water, talks about her latest book Islands of Abandonment: Life In The Post-Human Landscape. She talks to Neil about her travels to post-industrial wastelands, nuclear exclusion zones and sites of natural disasters to see how nature can reclaim even the most polluted landscapes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité is one of Sweden’s most well-known hip-hop artists. Born in Lund to American parents—an African American dad and a white mom—he has released eight solo albums and numerous singles, the majority of which have reached gold or platinum status. He talks to Neil about his new memoir A Drop of Midnight, in which he talks about growing up conflicted in Sweden, and his travels to South Carolina in search of his ancestors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew Harding is the BBC's Africa correspondent. He talks to Neil about his new book These Are Not Gentle People, about a crime that shook South Africa and split a community apart. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stuart Turton's debut novel, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, won the Costa First Novel Award and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards and the British Book Awards Debut of the Year. A Sunday Times bestseller for three weeks, it has been translated into over thirty languages and has also been a bestseller in Italy, Russia and Poland. His latest novel is The Devil And The Dark Water. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ivy Pochoda is the author of The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street - a Guardian and Amazon best book of 2013 - and Wonder Valley, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and a winner of the Strand Critics Circle Award. For many years she was a world-ranked squash player. She teaches creative writing at the Lamp Arts Studio in Skid Row. Ivy grew up in Brooklyn, NY and currently lives in West Adams, Los Angeles. Her latest novel is These Women. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's show, George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln In The Bardo, talks to Neil about the genius of the Russian short story in his latest book A Swim In A Pond In The Rain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just in time for Christmas! John Lanchester joins Neil for some spooky stories in his first short story collection, Reality and Other Stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Ross graduated from Harvard in 1990. He wrote for the New York Times from 1992 until 1996 when he became staff writer at the New Yorker. His first book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won the Guardian First Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of the essay collection Listen to This. His latest book is Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Noreena Hertz is a renowned thought leader, academic, and broadcaster who was named by The Observer “one of the world’s leading thinkers” and by Vogue “one of the world’s most inspiring women.” Her previous bestsellers—The Silent Takeover, I.O.U. and Eyes Wide Open—have been published in more than twenty countries, and her opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Financial Times, El Pais, Die Zeit and South China Morning Post. Hertz holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Cambridge University. She is based at University College London, where she holds an Honorary Professorship. Her latest book is The Lonely Century. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gavin Francis is an award-winning writer and GP. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, including Adventures in Human Being, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and Empire Antarctica, which won Scottish Book of the Year in the SMIT Awards and was shortlisted for both the Ondaatje and Costa Prizes. He has written for the Guardian, The Times, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. His work is published in eighteen languages. His latest book is Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. His latest novel is Trio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood, and followed this interest through a career researching the most enigmatic characters of all, the Neanderthals. Alongside her academic expertise, she has also earned a reputation for exceptional public engagement as a speaker, in print and broadcast. Her writing has featured in the Guardian, Aeon and Scientific American, and she has appeared on history and science programmes for BBC Radio 4. She works as an archaeological and creative consultant, and co-founded the influential TrowelBlazers project, and Rebecca is now the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008, winner of the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama. Her first book, the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. Her latest book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story is shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Haynes is the author of six books, her novels, A Thousand Ships, The Children of Jocasta, and The Amber Fury, and the non-fiction works, Pandora’s Jar, about women in Greek Myth, and The Ancient Guide To Modern Life.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author, who grew up in a small rural town. In 2015 he won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award for his pilot Windmills, and his plays include Heroes, which was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing. His musical, Moonlite, about a gay bushranger, was performed as part of the 2018 Midsumma Festival to critical acclaim, and was later selected for the Homegrown Grassroots development initiative. A film adaptation of his latest novel The Hunted is being developed in a joint production between Stampede Ventures and Vertigo Entertainment in Los Angeles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matthew Baker is the author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures. His stories have appeared in the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Story, Electric Literature and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the MacDowell Colony, among many others, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. His latest story collection is Why Visit America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist. She has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, London, and an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College. She has worked as an editor at New Scientist and Nature, and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, Wired, Observer, New York Times and Washington Post. She is the author of Decoding the Heavens, shortlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, and Cure, shortlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. Her latest book is The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of The Stars. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Terri White is Editor-in-Chief of Empire magazine, having previously edited some of the most read titles in the UK and US, including Time Out New York and Shortlist, where she was named Men's Magazine Editor of the Year. She has also written for the Guardian and The Pool. Her first book is the memoir Coming Undone. NB: This interview contains discussion of domestic violence, sexual abuse and self-harm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Bond, who won the British Psychology Society Prize 2015 for The Power of Others, is a freelance journalist and former senior editor and reporter at New Scientist. His latest book is Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated PBS/BBC television series that asks what it means to be human from a neuroscientist's point of view. Eagleman’s research encompasses time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He is the author of many books, including Sum, Incognito, The Brain, and The Runaway Species. Dr. Eagleman appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature. His latest book is Livewired: The Inside Story of The Ever-Changing Brain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels The Life of Objects, The Big Girls, One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones, and My Old Sweetheart, and two books of nonfiction, Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i and I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i. She lives in New York City. Her latest book is the memoir Miss Aluminium. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. Sophie talks to Neil about her "a bit speculative, a bit dystopian" new novel Blue Ticket. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Douglas Stuart talks to Neil about his Man Booker longlisted, Glasgow set debut novel Shuggie Bain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maria Konnikova talks to Neil Denny about her latest book The Biggest Bluff, in which she sets out to study luck and instead becomes a professional poker player. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Luke Turner is a writer and editor based in London. He co-founded the influential music website The Quietus where he runs a regular podcast and radio show. He has contributed to the Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice, NME, Q Mojo, Monocle, Nowness and Somesuch Stories, among other publications. Out of the Woods is his first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Power lives and works in London. His 'Brief Survey of the Short Story' has appeared in the Guardian since 2007. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and The White Review. Mothers is his first book. This interview first broadcast in May 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and won the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and her second was Orkney, which won a 2014 Somerset Maugham Award. Her latest novel is Painter to the King. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frances Cha is a former editor for CNN in Seoul and Hong Kong. A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University MFA writing program, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. If I Had Your Face is her first novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and documentary-maker who has travelled the world finding extraordinary characters to turn into film, print and audio. She writes for the Guardian, The Times, the Sunday Times and Tortoise. Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is her first book. In this interview Jenny talks on Neil about... sex robots, plus future technologies around giving birth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Hart is a biologist, broadcaster, academic and author. Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire, Adam is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4, and a presenter on BBC2. Adam talks about his new book Unfit for Purpose: When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World, and how our bodies are not built to cope with the modern diet, stress, social media and "fake news". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Science Writer Emily Anthes on her new book The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behaviour, Health, and Happiness. Emily talks to Neil about designing better hospitals, schools and prisons, "amphibious" homes and building a house on Mars. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Stephenson is an author and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. His previous book Let Not The Waves Of The Sea won Best First Book at the Scottish Book Awards. Set My Heart To Five is his debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lars Iyer is the author of the novels Nietzsche and the Burbs (2020) and Wittgenstein Jr (2014). He has also written a trilogy of novels, Spurious, Dogma and Exodus, which has received rave reviews in nearly all major literary publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), The Spectator and The Believer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Atkinson is a publisher who has been behind some of the most successful cookbooks of recent years. He lives in London but has a deep-rooted affection for the north of England, the land of his ancestors. He is the author of Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Farrier teaches English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 he was the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction, and his work had appeared in Eon and The Atlantic. His first book is Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark O'Connell is the author of To Be a Machine, which won the Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2017. He lives in Dublin with his family. He writes for the Guardian, Slate, the New York Times and The Millions. His latest book is Notes From An Apocalypse: A Personal Journey To The End of The World and Back. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, Huffington Post, Telegraph and Times Higher Education among others, and is a columnist for BBC History Magazine. Fern is the author of The Victorian Guide to Sex, and most recently Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Garth Greenwell is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His novella Mitko won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award. His novel What Belongs to You has been widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest book is Cleanness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist. The Mercies is her first novel for adults. Her bestselling works for children include The Girl of Ink & Stars and have won numerous awards including the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and the Blackwell's Children's Book of the Year. They have also been shortlisted for prizes such as the Costa Children's Book Award, the Blue Peter Best Story Award and the Foyles Book of the Year Award. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC Short Story Award in 2018. She read law at the LSE and was a legal academic before taking degrees in fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London and Central Saint Martins. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Prospect and Pree magazines. Her debut novel is Love After Love. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philip Hensher has written eleven novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Friendly Ones and Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa, and his latest novel is A Small Revolution in Germany. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eimear McBride is the author of the novels The Lesser Bohemians (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (winner of the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, and others). She was the inaugural creative fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading, and occasionally writes for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, and The Irish Times. Her latest novel is Strange Hotel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rosanna Amaka was born to African and Caribbean parents. She began writing her debut novel The Books of Echoes twenty years ago to give voice to the Brixton community in which she grew up. Her community was fast disappearing – as a result of gentrification, emigration back to the Caribbean and Africa, or simply with the passing away of the older generation. Its depiction of unimaginable pain redeemed by love and hope was also inspired by a wish to understand the impact of history on present-day lives. Rosanna Amaka lives in South London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist. Maggie & Me, his memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher's Britain, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Memoir of the Year, and won the Paddy Power Political Books 'Satire' Award and Stonewall Writer of the Year Award. Damian writes columns for the Big Issue and High Life and often appears on BBC Radio 4. He is creator and host of his own Literary Salon that premieres work from established and emerging writers. His debut novel You Will Be Safe Here is out now in paperback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen Moss is a naturalist, broadcaster, television producer and author. In a distinguished career at the BBC Natural History Unit his credits included Springwatch, Birds Britannia and The Nature of Britain. His books include The Robin: A Biography, A Bird in the Bush, The Bumper Book of Nature, Wild Hares and Hummingbirds and Wild Kingdom. He is also Senior Lecturer in Nature and Travel Writing at Bath Spa University. Originally from London, he lives with his family on the Somerset Levels, and is President of the Somerset Wildlife Trust. His latest book is The Accidental Countryside: Hidden Havens for Britain's Wildlife. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a novelist from South London. She is also a trustee of Latin American Women's Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe for and by Latin American Women. Her debut novel Stubborn Archivist was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and is now out in paperback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Halls is a London-based writer and journalist. He worked in pubs, off licences and several minimum wage jobs before deciding to return to school to pursue his passion for writing. In 2014 Ben completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and completed his Master of Fine Arts at Kingston University in 2016. The Quarry is his debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peter Swanson's novels include The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, nominated for an LA Times book award, The Kind Worth Killing, a Richard and Judy pick and the iBooks store's thriller of the year in 2015, and, most recently, Before She Knew Him. His latest novel is Rules For Perfect Murders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rosamund Lupton is the author of Sister, a BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime", a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, winner of the Strand Magazine critics award and the Richard and Judy Bookclub Readers' Choice Award. Her next two books Afterwards and The Quality of Silence (also a Richard and Judy pick) were Sunday Times bestsellers. Her books have been published in over thirty languages. Her latest novel is Three Hours. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. Her research takes her across the world: she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in three and is currently based in London. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. Her latest book is Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, and one work of non-fiction, Rain, which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She is a nature writer, critic and columnist for The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian, among others. Her latest novel is All Among the Barley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Groff is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels – Fates and Furies (named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015), The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia – as well as the story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Groff’s fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/O. Henry Award, among others, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2017, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, the Atlantic, One Story and Ploughshares, and in several of the annual The Best New American Stories anthologies. Her latest story collection is Florida. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eoin Colfer is the author of the internationally bestselling Artemis Fowl series, which has been translated into over forty languages. A Disney film adaptation will be released in 2019, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Dame Judi Dench. Eoin's books have won numerous awards including The British Children's Book of the Year, The Irish Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and The German Children's Book of the Year. Born in Ireland, Eoin was educated at Dublin University and qualified as a primary teacher, before turning his hand to writing in 2001. Highfire is his first adult fantasy novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An Yu was born and raised in Beijing, and left at the age of eighteen to study in New York at NYU. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English. Braised Pork is her debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ziya Tong is on the board of WWF International and was formerly the Vice Chair of WWF Canada. She presented Daily Planet, Discovery Channel's flagship science programme, until its final season in 2018. Tong also hosted the CBC's Emmy-nominated series ZeD, PBS' national prime-time series, Wired Science, and worked as a correspondent for NOVA scienceNOW. She is the author of The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain, which was made into a film by Netflix. Her latest book is The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Romesh Gunesekera is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction including Reef, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Sandglass, winner of the inaugural BBC Asia Award, and The Match, the ground-breaking cricket novel. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages and he is the recipient of many awards including a Premio Mondello in Italy. He was born in Colombo and lives in London. His latest novel is Suncatcher. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Meek is the author of six novels including The People's Act of Love which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. It has been published in more than thirty countries. Meek's last novel The Heart Broke In was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and he has also written two collections of short stories and two books of non-fiction, Private Island, which won the 2015 Orwell Prize and Dreams of Leaving and Remaining. He is a Contributing Editor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the Guardian and New York Times. His latest novel is To Calais, In Ordinary Time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Padraig Reidy hosts this episode, joined by Caleb Klaces to discuss his debut novel Fatherhood. They talk about the place of being a father today, the value of home and the novel as an adult bildungsroman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emma Forrest has published three novels, an essay collection and the memoir Your Voice In My Head. An Anglo-American currently based in London, she recently wrote and directed her feature debut, Untogether. Her latest novel is Royals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode Neil speaks to Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman. She was named journalist of the year (Press Gazette) and won the 2018 Paul Foot journalism award for her reportage on the Windrush scandal, which led to the downfall of the Home Secretary and the government loosening its ‘hostile environment’ policy for migrants. She tells Neil about her new book The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author of two novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device, which won the Collyer Bristow/London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, and For The Good Times which won the Gordon Burn Prize. He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK's post-punk/Industrial underground. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Téa Obreht is the author of The Tiger's Wife, winner of the Orange Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and her latest novel is Inland. She was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Padraig Reidy hosts this week, speaking to Guardian journalist and author Henry McDonald about his novel Two Souls. They talk punk, football and paramilitary activity in 70s and 80s Belfast, and how a few wrong choices changed the path of young men's lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Neil speaks to Sarah Perry, author of the bestselling The Essex Serpent, which won Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 and Book of the Year 2017 at the British Book Awards. Her latest novel is Melmoth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elle Nash is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Elle, NAILED, Reality Beach, Hobart, and other places. She was a member of the Denver Press Club and now lives in Arkansas. Occasionally she reads tarot in exchange for money. Her debut novel is Animals Eat Each Other. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and her work has appeared in The New York Times and The New Republic, among other publications. She is the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Author and music journalist David Stubbs joins Neil to talk about his latest book Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music. They chat about the evolution of synthesisers, the women who pioneered electronic music and where the genre is now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of five previous books of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the memoir about her father’s life and assassination, Songs of Blood and Sword, was published to acclaim. Her most recent novel is The Runaways, and her latest book is New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lillian Li joins Neil to talk about her debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelist Ben Fergusson joins Neil to talk about An Honest Man, the final book of his Berlin Trilogy. They discuss writing against the backdrop of 1989 Berlin, the summer after leaving school, and the novel's parallels between relationships, infidelity and espionage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Madeline Stevens joins Neil to talk about her first novel, Devotion. They discuss the drafts and graft that come before a debut novel, how Madeline's seven years spent working as a nanny in New York influenced her writing, and how what started out as a short story became Devotion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julian Hoffman joins Neil to talk about his latest book Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places. They discuss the aborted attempt by Boris Johnson to build an airport on the marshland of Kent's Hoo peninsula, what 'protection' really means when it comes to preservation, and why we owe it to future generations to maintain the habitats of threatened species. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Niven Govinden joins Neil to talk about his new novel This Brutal House, about family and protest in the vogue ball community of 1980s New York. Govinden's previous novels include All The Days And Nights, Graffiti My Soul and Black Bread White Beer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Smith is a lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, specializing in environmental literature and focusing particularly on oceans, climate change and the ‘Anthropocene’. He joined Neil to talk about his first novel, Doggerland, writing rooted in place, and the enjoyment of writing a character who is "really just a git". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poet Richard Osmond joins Neil to talk about his latest collection, Rock, Paper, Scissors, inspired by his experiences during the London Bridge terrorist attack on 3rd June 2017. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the essay collection Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion is her first book. She joined Neil to talk about how we're all forced to perform and monetize ourselves on the internet, the culture and industries around optimization and life-hacking, and the American tradition of self-reinvention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel DeLoache Williams is an ex-Vanity Fair photo editor and author of My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress. She tells Neil about her friendship with Anna Delvey, the 'Russian heiress' who deceived New York's art scene for a year, and how she became her mark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the 600th Little Atoms! and Neil welcomes Laura Cumming back to the show. Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her book, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, was Book of the Week on Radio 4, Wall Street Journal Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2017 James Tait Black Biography Prize and was published to critical acclaim (‘A riveting detective story: readers will be spellbound’ Colm Tóibín). Her first book, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, was described by Nick Hornby as ‘Brilliant, fizzing with ideas not just about art but human nature’ and by Julian Barnes as ‘that rare item: an art book where the text is so enthralling that the pictures almost seem like an interruption’. Laura’s latest book is On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire McGlasson is a journalist who works for ITV News and enjoys the variety of life on the road with a TV camera. She lives in Cambridgeshire. The Rapture is her debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lee Jackson is a Victorian enthusiast, creator of the popular online resource on the social history of Victorian London, www.victorianlondon.org, and currently working on a PhD entitled 'Dickensland'. His book Dirty Old London was described by The Times as 'a tightly argued, meticulously researched history of sanitation that reads like a novel' and by the Lancet as 'a triumph of popular scholarship'. His latest book Palaces of Pleasure: How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment covers topics as diverse as the origins of modern public house, football, music hall, the Victorian seaside, dance halls and pleasure gardens. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. Her first published story, 'Muzungu', was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize for African writing. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for her story 'The Sack'. The Old Drift is her first novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Caroline Crampton is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday and the New Humanist. She has appeared as a broadcaster on Newsnight, Sky News and BBC Radio 4. Her first book is The Way to The Sea: The Forgotten Histories of The Thames Estuary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded live at the Idler Festival 2019 at Fenton House, Hampstead. Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles on modern literature, psychoanalysis and cultural theory. His books include How to Read Freud and The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark. He is a regular contributor to Guardian, New Statesman and TLS. His latest book is Not Working: Why We Have To Stop. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carolina Setterwall was born in 1978 in Sala, Sweden. She studied Media and Communication in Uppsala, Stockholm and London and has worked within the music and publishing industries as an editor and writer. Setterwall lives in Stockholm with her son. Let's Hope for the Best is her first novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Observer, New Scientist, Wired, New Humanist among others, and she regularly presents science programmes on BBC radio. She has won awards from the Association of British Science Writers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And she was named European Science Journalist of the Year. She has a Masters degree in Engineering from Oxford University and was a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angela is the author of Geek Nation and Inferior, and her latest book is Superior: The Return of Race Science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, associate lecturer at Birkbeck College, and associate fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research where he runs the European Jewish Research Archive. His previous books include Uncivil War: The Israel Conflict in the Jewish Community. His latest book is Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Oxford before moving to Tokyo in 2001. The Bells of Old Tokyo is her first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard King is the author of the acclaimed How Soon Is Now?, which was named Sunday Times Music Book of the Year, and Original Rockers. His writing has appeared in the Observer, Vice, Guardian, Caught by the River and many other publications. He was co-editor of Loops, an occasional journal of music writing published jointly by Faber & Faber and Domino Records. His latest book is The Lark Ascending: The Music of the British Landscape. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wayétu Moore is the founder of One Moore Book and is a graduate of Howard University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. She teaches at the City University of New York's John Jay College and lives in Brooklyn. She Would Be King is her debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and VICE, among other publications. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. Rich lives with his wife and son in New Orleans. His latest book is Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pete Brown is a British author, journalist, blogger and broadcaster specialising in food and drink, especially the fun parts like beer and cider. His broad, fresh approach takes in social history, cultural commentary, travel writing, personal discovery and natural history, and his words are always delivered with the warmth and wit you'd expect from a great night down the pub. He writes for newspapers and magazines around the world and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's Food Programme. He was named British Beer Writer of the Year in 2009 and 2012, and Fortnum and Mason Online Drinks Writer of the Year in 2015. He blogs at petebrown.net and his latest book is Pie Fidelity: In Defence of British Food. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joanne Ramos was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated with a BA from Princeton University. After working in investment banking and private-equity investing for several years, she wrote for the Economist as a staff writer. Her debut novel is The Farm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born in 1954 in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed `unacceptable democratic tendencies'. He came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service. His works are banned in Uzbekistan. Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English translation, including The Railway, The Dead Lake, which was long listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground. The Devils' Dance is the first of his Uzbek language novels to appear in English, and the translation by Donald Rayfield won the 2019 ERBD Literature Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrea Lawlor lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College. Lawlor is a fiction editor for Fence and the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016). Paul Takes The Form of A Mortal Girl is their debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season Butler is a writer, artist and dramaturg born in Washington, DC. Through her work, she explores her interest in identity and otherness, the opportunities and traps of hindsight and hope, and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. An early draft of of her debut novel Cygnet was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian Women. She lives and works between London and Berlin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood) and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews and Climbing Days. He has written for the Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Caught by the River, Monocle and the Quietus. He is an RLF Fellow at Bristol University. Dan's latest book is Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Children of Jocasta and The Amber Fury, which was shortlisted for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year award, and a non-fiction book about Ancient History, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. She has written and presented two series of the BBC Radio 4 show,Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015, she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. Her latest novel is A Thousand Ships. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iain Reid is the author of two critically acclaimed, award-winning books of nonfiction. His internationally bestselling debut novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, has been published in more than twenty countries. Oscar-winner Charlie Kaufman is writing and directing a film based on the novel, which Reid will co-produce. His second novel, Foe, was an instant bestseller and feature film rights have been acquired by Anonymous Content, with Reid set to executive produce. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of several novels, including Imperial Bedrooms, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, and a collection of stories, The Informers. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers have all been made into films. His first work of non-fiction, White, was  published in 2019. He is the host of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast available on Patreon. He lives in Los Angeles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bev Thomas was a clinical psychologist in the NHS for many years. She currently works as an organisational consultant in mental health and other services. A Good Enough Mother is her debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA, a psychedelic biography of the 9/11 bomber Mohamed Atta, was an unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. His first novel, I Hate the Internet, was a bestseller everywhere, doing especially well in Serbia. His second novel, The Future Won't Be Long, wasn't a bestseller anywhere, but was published in the United States by a company that printed propaganda for Nazi Germany. His latest novel is Only Americans Burn in Hell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Isabella Hammad was born in London. She won the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story 'Mr. Can’aan'. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions and the Paris Review. The Parisian is her first novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Will Ashon is the author of Strange Labyrinth (Granta, 2017) and two novels. He previously ran BIG DADA records where his artists included Roots Manuva, MF DOOM, Kate Tempest and Diplo. Will's latest book is Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Temi Oh graduated from King’s College London in 2015 with a BSci in Neuroscience. While at KCL, Temi founded and ran a book-club called “Neuroscience-fiction”, where she led discussions about science-fiction books which focus on the brain. In 2016, she received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve Brusatte is a palaeontologist on the faculty of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He grew up in the Midwestern United States and has a BS in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago, MSc in Palaeobiology from the University of Bristol (UK), and PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in New York. At age 31, Steve is widely recognized as one of the leading palaeontologists of his generation. He has written nearly 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers during his decade of research in the field, discovered and named 10 new species of dinosaurs, and led groundbreaking studies on how dinosaurs rose to dominance and went extinct. Steve is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A K Benjamin is a Clinical Neuropsychologist, specialising in diagnostics and acute rehab. Previously he was a screenwriter, spent two years as a contemplative monk and has worked at a number of NGOs, with homeless addicts, with gangs and with children with acquired and congenital neurological conditions. He no longer lives in the UK. A K Benjamin is not his real name. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hanna Jameson wrote her first book at the age of seventeen. Paul Rees of Q Magazine described her as writing like 'an angel on speed'. She has worked for the NHS and travelled the USA, Japan and Europe, developing a particular interest in the US, which led to her studying for a BA in American History. The Last is her fourth novel and her first for Penguin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Foulds most recent books are In the Wolf's Mouth; The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature; and The Broken Word, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His latest book is Dream Sequence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist. Maggie & Me, his memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher's Britain, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Memoir of the Year, and won the Paddy Power Political Books 'Satire' Award and Stonewall Writer of the Year Award. Damian writes columns for the Big Issue and High Life and often appears on BBC Radio 4. He is creator and host of his own Literary Salon that premieres work from established and emerging writers. You Will Be Safe Here is his debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, followed by short story collection, Children's Children, and a flash fiction anthology Postcard Stories. In 2016 she won the Harper's Bazaar short story competition and was shortlisted for the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. The Fire Starters is her second novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Luke Turner is a writer and editor based in London. He co-founded the influential music website The Quietus where he runs a regular podcast and radio show. He has contributed to the Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice, NME, Q Mojo, Monocle, Nowness and Somesuch Stories, among other publications. Out of the Woods is his first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lewis Dartnell is a Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He has won several awards for his science writing, and contributes to the Guardian, the Times and the New Scientist. He has also written for television and appeared on BBC Horizon, Sky News, Wonders of the Universe, Stargazing Live, and the Sky At Night. His previous books include the bestseller The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch and his latest book is Origins: How The Earth Made Us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in a Brazilian-English household in London, where she still lives. She has a BA in English from Oxford and an MA in Comparative Literature at UCL. Yara is a trustee of Latin American Women's Aid, the only refuge run for and by Latin American women in the UK and has also given workshops on gender and power to teenage girls with feminist organisation Fearless Futures. Yara's writing has been published in Litro, and the UCL Publishers' Prize, and she received a Special Mention in the 2015 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Competition. Stubborn Archivist is her debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ken Hollings is a writer, broadcaster, cultural theorist and lecturer based in London. He is the author of the books Destroy All Monsters, Welcome To Mars, and The Bright Labyrinth. His work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies throughout the world, and he has written and presented programs for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, NPS in the Netherlands, ABC Australia, and Resonance 104.4FM. His latest book is The Space Oracle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1982. She grew up in Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of four previous books, most recently the highly acclaimed The Shadow of the Crescent Moon which was longlisted in 2014 for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is The Runaways. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Porter is the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which has been translated into twenty languages worldwide, and been made into a stage play starring Cillian Murphy. His latest book is Lanny, the story of a young boy, an elderly artist, and a mysterious spirit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written four novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and Capital, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E.M Forster Award, and the Premi Libreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His latest novel is The Wall. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and commentator. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine, and her novels include Women Who Blow On Knots and The Time of Mute Swans. Her latest novel is How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Julia Shaw is a scientist in the Department of Psychology at University College London (UCL). Her academic work, teaching and role as an expert witness have focused on different ways of understanding criminal behaviour. Dr Shaw has consulted as an expert on criminal cases, delivered police-training and military workshops, and has evaluated offender diversion programs. She is also the co-founder of Spot, a start-up that helps employees report workplace harassment and discrimination, and employers take action. Her work has been featured in outlets such as CNN, the BBC, the New Yorker, WIRED, Forbes, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. She is the author of Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her books include The Eichmann Trial, Denial: holocaust history on trial (a National Jewish Book Award-winner), Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, and Beyond Belief: the American press and the coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945. She lives in Atlanta. Her latest book is Antisemitism Here and Now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kristen R. Ghodsee was travelling in Europe, and spent the summer of 1990 witnessing first-hand the initial hope and euphoria that followed the sudden and unexpected collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Bloc. The political and economic chaos that followed inspired Ghodsee to pursue an academic career studying this upheaval, focusing on how ordinary people’s lives – and women’s particularly – changed when state socialism gave way to capitalism. For the last two decades, she has visited the region regularly and lived for over three years in Bulgaria and the Eastern parts of reunified Germany. Now a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she has won many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has written six books on gender, socialism, and postsocialism, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that continue to haunt the region to this day. Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Aeon, Dissent, Foreign Affairs and The New York Times. Her latest book is Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Georgina Harding is the author of three previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Her first book was a word of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar: A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village on the Coromandel coast. Her latest novel is Land of the Living. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including Timekeepers, A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map, Just My Type and Mauve. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize. His latest book is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. His latest book is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Weymouth's work has been published by a wide variety of outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon river and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-old Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. His first book, Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thea Lim’s novel An Ocean of Minutes is out now from Quercus/Hachette in the UK, Viking/Penguin Random House in Canada, and Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster in the US. Her writing has been published by the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST and others. She has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To see in the New Year, here's a repeat of our Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh from August. Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For Christmas Day, here's a repeat of our interview from June 2018 with Adam Kay. Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including Mitchell & Webb and Very British Problems. He previously worked as a junior doctor, detailing his funny and sad experiences in his first book This Is Going To Hurt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Frye is a professor and historian, whose research has taken him around the world and involved him in numerous archaeological digs since receiving his PhD from Duke University. He has published extensively in international academic journals. He is the author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood & Brick. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeff Jackson is the author of Mira Corpora, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Vice, and The Collagist, and five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award–winning Collapsable Giraffe theater company in New York City. His latest novel is Destroy All Monsters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Padraig Reidy talks to Paul Ewen. Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer based in south London. His work has appeared in the British Council's New Writing anthology, the Guardian, the TES, Tank, and Five Dials. Paul's first novel, Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2014. It went on to appear on numerous Books Of The Year lists, won a Society of Authors McKitterick Prize, and was described as "inspired" by the Sunday Times, whose reviewer also called it "a brilliant, deranged new comic creation... the funniest book I've read in years." Paul is now the author of Francis Plug: Writer in Residence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the novel The Incendiaries. Her writing is published in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, Noon, Electric Literature, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Omi International, the Steinbeck Center, and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Born in South Korea, she has lived most of her life in the United States.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Page McBee was ‘masculinity expert’ for Vice and the first trans man ever to box at Madison Square Garden. His essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, Glamour and Salon. He is the author of Man Alive, and most recently Amateur: A True Story About What Makes A Man. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University. His latest novel is Paris in the Dark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and critic. His most recent book, The Mirror, was described as ‘beautifully written . . . immersive . . . captivating’ by the Guardian. As Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy, he created the flagship ‘Writing a Novel’ six-month course in 2009 and since then has helped hundreds of writers find their voice. He is also the author of Writing a Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rose George is the author of A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World, and The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, which was judged one of the best books of 2008 by the Economist, and one of the top ten science books of the same year by the American Library Association, and Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that brings you Ninety Percent of Everything, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and won the Mountbatten Literature Award by the British Maritime Foundation. Rose writes frequently for the Guardian, the New Statesman and many others, and her two TED talks, on sanitation and seafaring, have had 3 million views. Her latest book in Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Moss is the author of six novels and a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels are Cold Earth, Night Waking (Fiction Uncovered Award), Bodies of Light (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), Signs for Lost Children (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and The Tidal Zone (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize). Her latest novel is Ghost Wall. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Ames is the author of nine books including The Extra Man, Wake Up, Sir!, and You Were Never Really Here, all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, and Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart. He has fought in two amateur boxing matches as "The Herring Wonder". He lives in Los Angeles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ivy Pochoda is a novelist and writer, previously a world ranked squash player. Her novel Visitation Street was chosen as an Amazon Best Book of 2013 and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She has written for a number of outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Huffington Post. She teaches creative writing at the Lamp Arts Studio in Skid Row, and her latest novel is Wonder Valley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patrick deWitt is the author of The Sisters Brothers, which won the Governor General's Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. He also is the author of Ablutions, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice, and Undermajordomo Minor. The Sisters Brothers is being adapted for film by Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet), to star Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Riz Ahmed and John C. Reilly, for release in 2018. His latest novel is French Exit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Redhill is the author of nine novels including Consolation, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Martin Sloane, a finalist for the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious book award which he won with Bellevue Square. He's written a novel for young adults, four collections of poetry and two plays, including the internationally celebrated Goodness. He also writes a series of crime novels under the name Inger Ash Wolfe, one of which, The Calling, was made in to a feature film starring Susan Sarandon. Michael lives in Toronto. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He has written and presented many award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including the flagship weekly Radio 4 programme INSIDE SCIENCE and THE CURIOUS CASES OF RUTHERFORD & FRY with Dr Hannah Fry. He is the author CREATION, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize, A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED, and most recently, THE BOOK OF HUMANS. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She writes regularly for numerous outlets including The Guardian and The Pool, and a weekly TinyLetter, which Vogue said ‘pops up in your inbox like lucid dreaming.’ She also writes all of the marketing emails for Spotify, so you’ve probably deleted her work. Jean is the author of the memoir This Really Isn’t About You. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie Mackintosh won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta magazine and TANK magazine among others. her debut novel The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University, and to complete a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at King’s College London. Previously the author of the memoir Bleaker House, her latest book is Mrs Gaskell and Me. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and won the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and her second was Orkney, which won a 2014 Somerset Maugham Award. Her latest novel is Painter to the King. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona and Teach Us to Sit Still. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, and writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His latest book is Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miriam Toews was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published four novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Governor General's Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award (twice), and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her latest novel is Women Talking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Groff is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels – Fates and Furies (named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015), The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia – as well as the story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Groff’s fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/O. Henry Award, among others, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2017, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, the Atlantic, One Story and Ploughshares, and in several of the annual The Best New American Stories anthologies. Her latest story collection is Florida. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Donkor was born in London, to Ghanaian parents. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and now teaches English Literature to secondary school students. His debut novel is Hold. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, and one work of non-fiction, Rain, which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She is a nature writer, critic and columnist for The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian, among others. Her latest novel is All Among the Barley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Atkins’s first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright Prize. He works as an editor and his journalism has appeared in the Guardian and Granta. In 2016 he was a recipient of the British Library Eccles Prize. His latest book is The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Madeline Miller has a BA and MA from Brown University in Latin and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching both for over a decade. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama, specialising in adapting classical tales to a modern audience. Her first novel The Song of Achilles was the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Her latest novel is Circe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gavin Francis is a GP, and the author of True North, Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins, which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Costa Prize, and Adventures in Human Being. He also writes for the Guardian, the Times, London Review of Books and Granta. Gavin's latest book is Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Lippman has been awarded every major prize in crime fiction. Since the publication of What the Dead Know, each of her hardcovers has hit the New York Times bestseller list. A recent recipient of the first-ever Mayor’s Prize, she lives in Baltimore, New Orleans and New York City with her family. Laura’s latest novel is Sunburn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miranda Doyle's family come from the tiny island of Coney in Sligo Bay. She grew up in Edinburgh alongside three brothers and a suspicious number of ill-fated pets. With an MA from Goldsmiths in Creative and Life Writing she has lectured on Autobiography for the Philosophy and European Literature degree at Anglia Ruskin University and continues to teach creative writing. Her debut book, a memoir titled A Book of Untruths, written with the support of an award from Arts Council England, explores the lies we tell ourselves. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dorthe Nors was born in 1970 and studied literature at the University of Aarhus. She is one of the most original voices in contemporary Danish literature. Her short stories have appeared in numerous international periodicals including including The Boston Review and Harpers, and she is the first Danish writer ever to have a story published in the New Yorker. Nors has published four novels so far, in addition to a collection of stories Karate Chop, and a novella Minna needs rehearsal space, also published by Pushkin Press. Karate Chop won the prestigious P. O. Enquist Literary Prize in 2014. She lives in rural Jutland, Denmark. Her latest novel is Mirror, Shoulder, Signal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fred Pearce is an award-winning journalist and author, reporting from 87 countries. He is the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine, a regular broadcaster and contributor to the Guardian, Washington Post and others. He has written fourteen books on environmental and development issues, translated into 24 languages. Fred's latest book is Fallout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely in newspapers including the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review, and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio, where appearances include Question Time, Newsnight and The Review Show. She has judged many literary prizes, including the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and she was a co-winner of the 2015 Eccles British Library Writer's Award. Her latest book is Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim Winton has published over twenty books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into many different languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). Active in the environmental movement, he is the Patron of the Australian Marine Conservation Society. He lives in Western Australia, and his latest novel is The Shepherd's Hut. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for Ponti, her first novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, Huffington Post, Telegraph and Times Higher Education among others, and is a columnist for BBC History Magazine. Fern is the author of The Victorian Guide to Sex, and most recently Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including Mitchell & Webb and Very British Problems. He previously worked as a junior doctor, detailing his funny and sad experiences in his first book This Is Going To Hurt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Inara Verzemnieks teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. She is the author of Among The Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel Trilling is the editor of New Humanist magazine and has reported extensively on refugees in Europe. His work has been published in the London Review of Books, Guardian, New York Times and others, and won a 2017 Migration Media Award. His first book, Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain’s Far Right, was longlisted for the 2013 Orwell Prize. Daniel’s latest book is Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge on the Borders of Europe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aida Edemariam, whose father is Ethiopian and mother Canadian, grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto, and has worked as a journalist in New York, Toronto and London, where she is currently a senior feature writer and editor for the Guardian. Her first book is The Wife’s Tale. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ziyad Marar is the author of Intimacy (2014), Deception (The Art of Living) (2008) and The Happiness Paradox (2003) and is President of Global Publishing at Sage Publications. His latest book is Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lucy Wood is the critically acclaimed author of Diving Belles, a collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore, and Weathering, a debut novel about mothers, daughters and ghosts. She has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, and was runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has also received a Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and the Holyer an Gof Award. Weathering was named as one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2016. Lucy’s latest collection of short stories is The Sing of the Shore. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Power lives and works in London. His 'Brief Survey of the Short Story' has appeared in the Guardian since 2007. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and The White Review. Mothers is his first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the first female author to win two National Book Awards for Fiction, for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones(2011). She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time, the author of the memoir Men We Reaped and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leo Benedictus is a freelance feature writer for the Guardian and other publications. His first novel, The Afterparty was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. His latest novel is Consent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the third of our shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Dr Kathryn Mannix about her book With The End in Mind.Kathryn Mannix has spent her medical career working with people who have incurable, advanced illnesses. Starting in cancer care and changing career to become a pioneer of the new discipline of palliative medicine, she has worked in teams in hospices, hospitals and in patients’ own homes to deliver palliative care, optimising quality of life even as death is approaching. Having qualified as a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist in 1993, she started the UK’s (possibly the world’s) first CBT clinic exclusively for palliative care patients. Her book With The End In Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial, is shortlisted for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the Second of three shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Lindsey Fitzharris about The Butchering Art, and Ayobami Adebayo about her novel Stay With Me.Lindsey Fitzharris received her doctorate in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Wellcome Institute. She is the creator of the popular website The Chirurgeon's Apprentice, and she writes and presents the YouTube series Under the Knife. She has written for the Guardian, the Lancet, the New Scientist, Penthouse, the Huffington Post and Medium, and appeared on PBS, Channel 4 UK, BBC and National Geographic. Lindsey is the author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine.Ayobami Adebayo’s stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. She holds BA and MA degrees in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife and also has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was awarded an international bursary for creative writing. She has been the recipient of a number of fellowships and residencies. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Stay With Me is her debut novel and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jillian Scudder is an astrophysicist and assistant professor at Oberlin College, Ohio. She has been writing ‘Astroquizzical’, a blog answering space-related questions from the public, for over five years. Her writing has also been published in Forbes, Quartz, Medium, and The Conversation. Astroquizzical is Jillian’s first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first of three shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Meredith Wadman about The Vaccine Race, and Sigrid Rausing about Mayhem: A Memoir.Meredith Wadman, MD, has a long profile as a medical reporter and has covered biomedical research politics from Washington, DC, for twenty years. She has written for Nature, Fortune, The New York Times, andThe Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she began medical school at the University of British Columbia and completed medical school as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses.Sigrid Rausing is the editor of Granta magazine and the publisher of Granta Books. She is the author of two previous books: History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia, and Everything is Wonderful, which was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and of St Antony's College, Oxford. Sigrid is the author of Mayhem: A Memoir. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr David Adam is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop and an editor at Nature, the world’s top scientific journal. Before that he was a specialist correspondent on the Guardian for seven years, writing on science, medicine and the environment. During this time he was named feature writer of the year by the Association of British Science Writers, and reported from Antarctica, the Arctic, China and the depths of the Amazon jungle. David’s latest book is The Genius Within: Smart Pills, Brain Hacks and Adventures in Intelligence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and the memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her books have won multiple prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Book Award, and been shortlisted for many others, among them the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Neustadt Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Dublin International IMPAC Award. In 2014 Forna won the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, an award from Yale University in honour of an author's body of work. Forna has acted as judge for a number of literary awards, including the International Man Booker. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. In 2017, she was awarded an OBE. Her latest novel is Happiness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Hepworth has been writing, broadcasting and speaking about music and media since the seventies. He was involved in the launch and editing of magazines such as Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, among many others.He was one of the presenters of the BBC rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test and one of the anchors of the corporation’s coverage of Live Aid in 1985. He has won the Editor of the Year and Writer of the Year awards from the Professional Publishers Association and the Mark Boxer award from the British Society of Magazine Editors. David is the author of Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars, which is shortlisted for the 2018 Penderyn Book Prize. Little Atoms is the official podcast of the Penderyn Book Prize Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of eleven previous books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Harvest (shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). His latest novel is The Melody. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 500th Little Atoms! Philip Hensher has written nine novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers and Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa. Philip's latest novel is The Friendly Ones. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cathi Unsworth began a career in journalism at nineteen on the music weekly Sounds, and has since worked for music, arts, film and lifestyle journals. She is the author of five previous novels: Weirdo, The Not Knowing, The Singer, Bad Penny Blues and Without the Moon, and edited the award-winning compendium London Noir. Her latest novel is That Old Black Magic.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matthew Sweet is a journalist and broadcaster. He presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio Four. He is the author of The West End Front, Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. He has edited and introduced the work of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Thackeray, George Eliot and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A Brief History of Fun, The Age of Excess, Truly, Madly, Cheaply and The Rules of Film Noir. Matthew’s latest book isOperation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil talks feminist heroes with author Julia Pierpoint Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Liam Drew is a writer, former neurobiologist and mammal. He has a PhD in sensory biology from University College London, and spent twelve years researching the neural and genetic basis of schizophrenia, the biology of pain and the birth of new neurons in the adult mammalian brain at Columbia University, New York and at UCL. His writing has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Slate and the Guardian. Liam's first book is I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born in Sydney, Tim Baker lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about jazz. He has worked on film projects in India, China, Mexico, Brazil and Australia, and currently lives in the South of France with his wife, their son, and two rescue animals, a dog and a cat. His debut novel, Fever City, was published in 2016 and went on to be shortlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey New Blood Dagger award and nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s 2017 Shamus Award. Tim's latest novel is City Without Stars. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Abi Andrews was born in 1991 in the Midlands, and now lives and works in South East London. She studied English and creative writing at Goldsmiths, and her work has been published in The Dark Mountain Project, Tender, Five Dials and The Bohemyth, amongst others. Her debut novel is The Word for Woman is Wilderness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel H. Pink is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling Drive, To Sell is Human and A Whole New Mind. His books have been translated into 35 languages and have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. Dan's latest book is When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Discontent and its Civilisations. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York. His latest novel Exit West was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and a story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. Jon's latest novel Reservoir 13 was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, and then won the 2017 Costa Prize for Best Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tony White  is the author of novels including Foxy-T, the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans and editor and co-editor of short story collections including Croatian Nights, with numerous short stories published in journals, exhibition catalogues and collections including All Hail the New Puritans. Tony has been writer in residence at the Science Museum, London and Leverhulme Trust writer in residence at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Tony White collaborated with Blast Theory to write Ivy4evr, an SMS-based, interactive drama for young people broadcast by Channel 4 in October 2010 and nominated for a BIMA award in 2011 by the British Interactive Media Association. Tony White is currently chair of London's award-winning arts radio station Resonance 104.4fm, and his latest novel is The Fountain in the Forest. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ausma Zehanat Khan holds a Ph.D. in International Human Rights Law with a specialisation in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. She has practised immigration law and taught human rights law at Northwestern University and York University. Formerly, she served as Editor in Chief of Muslim Girl magazine, the first magazine to reflect the lives of young Muslim women. She is a longtime community activist and writer. Born in Britain, Ausma lived in Canada for many years before recently becoming an American citizen. Her debut novel, The Unquiet Dead, won the Barry Award, the Arthur Ellis Award and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel The Language of Secrets is published in February 2018.Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. Her novels and essays have been widely translated and her work has been published in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. She is the author of the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth, and the Essay Tell Me How it Ends. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. From 2002 to 2005 he was a senior editor at OpenDemocracy. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a bestiary for the 21st Century, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. His latest book is A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Orwell wrote some of his most renowned essays for the British left-wing publication Tribune between 1940 and 1947, including Books vs Cigarettes, You And The Atom Bomb and the regular As I Please column. These works were compiled by Paul Anderson in the book Orwell in Tribune.Paul Anderson is a former editor of Tribune and deputy editor of the New Statesman. He talked to Little Atoms about Orwell's life and legacy.Interview first broadcast on 18 August 2006. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A classic Little Atoms from 2010 to ease you into the new year: Professor Brian Cox takes on the big questions, including what happens if you put a cat in a Large Hadron Collider Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You,won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the American Library Association's Alex Award. She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and her latest novel is Little Fires Everywhere.Susie Boyt is the author of five other acclaimed novels and the much-loved memoir My Judy Garland Life which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize, staged at the Nottingham Playhouse and serialised on BBC Radio 4. She has written about art, life and fashion for the Financial Times for the past fourteen years and has recently edited The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James. She is also a director at the Hampstead Theatre. Her latest novel is Love & Fame. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julie Bindel is a renowned investigative journalist, and has written extensively on religious fundamentalism, violence against women, the international surrogacy trade, mail order brides, trafficking, and unsolved murders. She writes regularly for The Guardian, New Statesman, Truthdig and Standpoint Magazine, and frequently appears on the BBC and Sky News. She was Visiting Journalist at Brunel University, UK (2013 - 2014) and is now on the advisory board for www.byline.com. Julie's latest book is The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth.John Crace is the Guardian's newspaper's parliamentary sketch writer, and author of their "Digested Read" column. He is the author of a number of books, the latest is I, Maybot: The Rise and Fall. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Higgs is the author of I HAVE AMERICA SURROUNDED: THE LIFE OF TIMOTHY LEARY; THE KLF: CHAOS, MAGIC AND THE BAND WHO BURNED A MILLION POUNDS; STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: MAKING SENSE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY; and the novels THE BRANDY OF THE DAMNED and THE FIRST CHURCH ON THE MOON. John's latest book is WATLING STREET. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Contagion has haunted so much of 20th century culture, from Camus’s Plague to Romero’s zombies. In this episode, we examine real and imagined epidemics, and meet the people whose job it is to stop them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Judith Matloff is a Harvard graduate and teaches conflict reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Matloff has pioneered safety training for journalists around the world, advising various international organisations including the Dart Center and International News Safety Institute. She has won several fellowships, including a Fulbright and MacArthur, and is the author of Fragments of a Forgotten War and Home Girl. Her latest book is The War is in the Mountains: Violence in the World's High Places. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Futurists like Marinetti and D’Annunzio revelled in the destructive energy of battle, but in Weimar Germany after world war 1, artists such as Otto Dix and Hans Fallada documented the horror of disfigurement, while scientists and medics tried to rebuild ruined men. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, London Review of Books, n+1, and others. In 2017 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. His latest novel is Moving Kings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Mesmerism” was a part of mainstream medicine in the 19th century, with many believing the unprovable concept of “animal magnetism”. The idea influenced everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sigmund Freud, creating lurid tales of split personalities and mind control, from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Trilby. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist, author and broadcaster. She is the author of Geek Science: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World, and her latest book is Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong - and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 1 of Little Atoms' documentary series "Converging Cultures" explores the influence of science on the Romantic and Gothic imagination. Electricity captivated the greatest minds of the “age of wonder”. Gentlemen amateurs amazed audiences with their experiments, and some even believed electricity could conquer death itself. The young Mary Shelley was as enthralled as anyone - leading to the greatest horror creation of all time: Frankenstein.Presented by Neil DennyProduced by Thomas GlasserLittle Atoms' series Converging Cultures was created with the support of the Wellcome Trust Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ann Druyan is an author and television and film writer & producer whose work is largely concerned with the effects of science and technology on our civilization. She was co-writer with Carl Sagan and Steven Soter of the Emmy and Peabody Award winning television series COSMOS. This interview was first broadcast in March 2013. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marcel Theroux is the author of five novels: A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, The Paperchase (winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award), Far North (shortlisted for America's prestigious National Book Award), and Strange Bodies. His latest novel is The Secret Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marcus Du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics and Simonyi Professor for the Public understanding of Science at Oxford University, and Jamie Perera is a composer and sound artist. In this show we talk about and listen to their musical, mathematical collaboration The Sound of Proof. Click here for the experiment that Marcus mentions at the end of the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. His scientific research is published in journals from Science to Nature, and he is also the author of the internationally bestselling books Sum and Incognito. He is the writer and presenter of the companion BBC television series The Brain.Anthony Brandt is an internationally acclaimed composer and a Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. His musical output includes two chamber operas and works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance, theatre, film, and television. He is also Artistic Director of the award-winning new music ensemble Musiqa.Anthony and David are the authors of The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes The World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dallas Campbell has presented some of the most ambitious landmark series across the BBC, such as City in the Sky with Dr Hannah Fry and Stargazing Live with Dara O'Brian and Brian Cox, which included broadcasting Astronaut Tim Peake's historic live launch to the International Space Station and was nominated for a BAFTA. In 2014, Dallas embarked on a six-part international series for National Geographic and he continues to regularly present for the Horizon Guide series on BBC4. In 2016 he went back in time to re-create 'Television's First Night', for the 80th anniversary of BBC television. Dallas is a regular contributor to the BBC's science magazine Focus, The Times' Eureka magazine and has written for The Observer. He is the author of Ad Astra: An Illustrated Guide to Leaving The Planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christopher Bollen is a writer who lives in New York City. He regularly writes about art, literature, and culture. He is the author of Lightning People and Orient and is currently the Editor at Large at Interview Magazine. Christopher's latest novel is The Destroyers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A former theologian, Sarah Sentilles completed her undergraduate degree at Yale and both a Masters and a Doctorate at Harvard. She was a college professor for over a decade before becoming a full time writer and is now a passionate advocate for life lived by peace and principle. Her previous books are Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton, A Church of her Own: What Happens When A Woman Takes the Pulpit and Breaking Up With God: A Love Story. Her latest book is Draw Your Weapons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Meades is a writer on architecture, culture and food, a novelist and television presenter, and a longtime friend of Little Atoms. This episode, marking the release of a boxset of Jonathan's TV work, was first broadcast in October 2008. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as 'one of America's most important novelists'. She is the author of the international bestsellers, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by the New Yorker for their 'Twenty Under Forty' list. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Her latest novel is Forest Dark.Kamila Shamsie is the author of six previous novels: In the City by the Sea; Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Salt and Saffron; Broken Verses; Burnt Shadows (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction) and A God in Every Stone, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Three of her novels have received awards from Pakistan's Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2013 was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist. Her latest novel, Home Fire has been longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. As the Central Europe Correspondent first for the Guardian and then for the BBC, he chronicled the collapse of communism and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He won the Sony Gold Award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting. The author of four books, including the acclaimed McMafia, he has been regularly consulted by the US and European governments on major policy issues and ran an NGO for three years, assisting with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. In this episode, broadcast in October 2011, Misha discussed DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages; like her second novel, The Lessons, it was read on BBC radio's Book at Bedtime. In 2006 she won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future.Her prize-winning short fiction has appeared in Prospect, on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies. In 2009 she was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Naomi broadcasts regularly, has guest-presented Front Row on BBC Radio 4 and writes regularly for Prospect and the Guardian. Her third novel, The Liars' Gospel, was published by Penguin in August 2012.This episode of Little Atoms was first broadcast in February 2013. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Writer Jon Ronson has been one of Little Atoms most regular guests. In his very first appearance on the show in 2005, he talked to Neil Denny and Richard Sanderson about the odd and unusual characters he met in his work, including Omar Bakri Muhammad, Jonathan King and the eponymous Men Who Stare At Goats. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was the President of the Royal Society until 2010, and is the Astronomer Royal. A member of the House of Lords, he is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His awards include the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Einstein Award of the World Cultural Council and the Crafoord Prize (Royal Swedish Academy). He was the recipient of the 2011 Templeton Prize. Martin's latest book is From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons, which expands on hIs 2010 BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures.THIS PROGRAMME WAS THE 200TH EDITION OF LITTLE ATOMS.First broadcast on 3rd June 2011. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vanessa Potter spent 16 years as an award-winning broadcast producer in London's advertising industry, before one day fate conspired to turn the lights out on her. Suddenly losing then slowly regaining her sight led Vanessa to change direction, turning the camera upon herself to tell her story via immersive art and storytelling. Vanessa's collaborations have led to some exciting partnerships, and she is currently working on developing an interactive EEG science-art project that allows the public to see and understand the effects of mindfulness on their brains. She is also involved in several other scientific research projects. Her speaking engagements include a June 2016 TEDx talk in Ghent, Belgium. Vanessa is the author of Patient H69: The Story of My Second Sight.Pía Spry-Marqués gained her PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge, where, following post-doctoral research, she now works in communications. Her research took her across Europe and across time, from the late Iron Age back to the Ice Age, identifying, classifying and decoding the meaning of animal remains in human-associated deposits. Originally from Spain, Pía is predisposed to a keen understanding, awareness and love of the pig and the many tasty pork products that are so much a part of Spanish cuisine. Pia is the author of PigPork: Archaeology, Zoology and Edibility. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ryan Gattis is the author of Kung Fu and All Involved, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award & the Lire Award for Noir of the Year in France. Gattis lives and writes in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the street art crew UGLARworks & a founding board member of 1888, a Southern California literary arts non-profit. Ryan’s latest novel is Safe.Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Paris Review Daily, Transition and elsewhere. She is a cofounder and former publisher of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. Zinzi’s debut novel is What We Lose. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a fortnightly column for The Guardian and contributes regularly to many other Australian and international publications. Jeff is a member of the 3RRR Breakfasters team and the immediate past editor of literary journal Overland. He is the author of a number of award-nominated books, including Money Shot and Communism: a love story. Jeff's latest book in No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elena Lappin is a writer and editor. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Prague and Hamburg, and has lived in Israel, Canada, the United States and – longer than anywhere else – in London. She is the author of Foreign Brides and The Nose, and has contributed to numerous publications, including Granta, Prospect, the Guardian and the New York Times Book Review. Elena is the author of a memoir, What Language Do I Dream In? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel McCormack is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4s The Kitchen Cabinet, and has also broadcast on the station's From Our Own Correspondent, the Food Programme and appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 2 on both the Simon Mayo show and the Chris Evans show. Rachel is the author of Chasing the Dram: Finding the Spirit of Whisky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of the novels A Jury Of Her Peers, The Sabbathday River, The White Rose and Admission. A film version of Admission starring Tina Fey, Paul Rudd and Lily Tomlin was released in 2013. Jean’s latest novel is The Devil and Webster.Kanishk Tharoor is a writer based in New York City and the author of the short story collection Swimmer Among the Stars. His stories and essays have appeared in publications in India, the US, the UK, and the Middle East. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Grindrod grew up on 'the last road in London' on Croydon's New Addington housing estate, surrounded by the Green Belt. He is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, described by the Independent on Sunday as 'a new way of looking at modern Britain'. He has written for the Guardian, Financial Times, Big Issue and The Modernist and has worked as a bookseller and publisher for over twenty-five years. He runs the popular website dirtymodernscoundrel.com and his latest book is Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Originally from Swaziland, he spent a number of years living with migrant workers in South Africa, studying patterns of exploitation and political resistance in the wake of apartheid. Alongside his ethnographic work, he writes about development, inequality, and global political economy, contributing regularly to the Guardian, Al Jazeera and other online outlets. His work has been funded by Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. Jason Hickel is the author of The Divide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beau Lotto is Professor of Neuroscience at University of London Goldsmiths, and a visiting scholar at NYU, where he specialises in the biology and psychology of perception. He has conducted research on human perception and behaviour for more than 25 years. In 2001 Beau founded Lab of Misfits, which had a two year residency at the Science Museum, London. Beau is the author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men, and the story collection Noise. His latest novel is White Tears. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. Her novel Eileen was awarded the 2016 Pen/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her short fiction has earned her the Paris Review Plimpton Prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Her collection Homesick for Another World was published in January 2017. McGlue was her debut novel, and the winner of the Fence Modern Prize for Prose and the Believer Book Award, and is being published in the U.K. for the first time.Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions which was published in 1990 to wide acclaim, and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, published in 2004, which garnered similar praise. Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is also a respected critic who has reviewed for all the major British newspapers, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Lucy's first novel is Peculiar Ground. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This interview was first broadcast on 21 November 2008.Adam Curtis is a producer, writer and director of documentaries such as Bitter Lake, HyperNormalisation, The Century of the Self, and The Power of Nightmares. In this episode, Adam talks about the concept of hyper-individualism and his series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, which was shortlisted for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year award, and a non-fiction book about Ancient History, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. She has written and presented two series of the BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015, she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. Her latest novel is The Children of Jocasta. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Phillip Lewis was born and raised in a small town called West Jefferson in the mountains of North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later received a law degree from Campbell University. While his law practice is based in downtown Charlotte, much of his work has been in the western part of North Carolina, in the mountains. Phillip's debut novel is The Barrowfields. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark O'Connell is a writer based in Dublin. He is Slate’s books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” blog; his work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Observer, and The Independent. Mark’s first book is To Be a Machine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil Woods was an undercover cop whose brief was to infiltrate Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs. Starting out in the early 90s and making the rules up as he went, Neil was at the forefront of police surveillance. He quickly earned a name as the most successful operative of his time and his expertise was called upon by drugs squads around the country to tackle an ever growing problem. But after years on the streets, spending time with the vulnerable users at the bottom of the chain, Neil began to question the seemingly futile war he was risking both his life and sanity for. Good Cop, Bad War is an intense account of the true effects of the War on drugs and a gripping insight into the high pressure world of British undercover policing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The second of two episodes of Little Atoms with shortlisted writers for the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize. This week, Ed Yong on his book I Contain Multitudes, plus a repeat of our interview with the winner of the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize Suzanne O'Sullivan on her book It's All In Your Head. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first of two episodes of Little Atoms with shortlisted writers for the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize. This week, Sarah Moss on her novel The Tidal Zone, David France of his history of AIDS How To Survive a Plague, and novelist Maylis de Kerangal on Mend the Living. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman, and often appears on television and radio talking about the arts, culture and all things American. In this podcast, Sarah discusses Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby.First broadcast on 10th September 2013. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Little Atoms from 2009, Noam Chomsky examines the Obama administration and asks what has really changed.Chomsky describes the first term of the Bush administration as “off the spectrum” in both aggression and arrogance. US international prestige sank to the lowest point since measured. It is hardly surprising therefore that the next candidate should have moved towards the centre.Violent interventionism has gone hand in hand with American exceptionalism for centuries, says Chomsky. Obama’s ideology, according to Chomsky has been “less extreme but basically hasn’t changed.”Chomsky explores the history and dangers of humanitarian intervention.“You can’t say it can never be benevolent but there is a heavy burden of proof. It makes sense to talk about the responsibility to protect, but it should not be left in the hands of violent, aggressive powers”.The internet played a prominent role in changing popular activism and proliferating conspiracy theories under the Bush regime. Through the internet, the 9/11 movement diverted people away from activism on serious issues.“It stopped questions on things the administration would rather keep secret.”But Obama has found the internet useful. Chomsky argues has it been “a very effective cult generator” and crucial in the construction of Brand Obama.Obama, like Bush, used the internet to distract activists from protesting state crimes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

458: George Saunders & Kathryn HughesGeorge Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short-story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggen­heim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. His debut novel is Lincoln in the Bardo.Kathryn Hughes is the author of award-winning biographies of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot, both of which were filmed for the BBC. For the past fifteen years she has been a literary critic and columnist for the Guardian. Educated at Oxford University, and with a PhD in Victorian Studies, she is currently Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia and Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. Her latest book is Victorians Undone: Tales of Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A journalist, aviation blogger, documentary producer and crash investigator, Christine Negroni has more than fifteen years' experience observing and participating in the international effort to create safer skies. She currently reports for the New York Times, ABC News and Air & Space. Christine is the author of The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist who specializes in using clues from the human skeleton to understand how people lived and died in the past. She has worked on excavation sites all over the world including Roman-period burials near the Giza pyramids, remote Greek islands, a Buddhist monastery in northern Thailand, and the famous central Anatolian site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Brenna is one-quarter of the TrowelBlazers project, an outreach, advocacy and academic effort to celebrate women’s contributions to archaeology. Brenna is the author of Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Stevenson is a writer, broadcaster, futurologist and founder of The League of PragmaticOptimists. He has written for Radio 4, The Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and New Statesman,and is the author of the critically acclaimed An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. He lives in London and is an adviser to (among others) The Virgin Earth Challenge, Civilised Bank and The Atlas of the Future.Mark’s latest book is We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World.Rory Clements won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award in 2010 for his second novel, Revenger.He is the author of the John Shakespeare series of novels which are currently in development for TVby the team behind Poldark and Endeavour. Since 2007, Rory has been writing full-time in a quietcorner of Norfolk, England, where he lives with his family. Rory’s latest novel is Corpus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sheena Kamal has been a stunt double (for children), a stand-in (most notably Archie Panjabi) and a film/TV extra. She has been a producer’s assistant and most recently, a researcher for a gritty TV crime drama series set in Toronto. Sheena’s debut novel Eyes Like Mine is inspired by one issue that kept cropping up during her research- the plight of the missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. Sheena holds an HBA in Political Science from the University of Toronto, which she attended on Canada's most prestigious scholarship and was awarded a TD Canada Trust Scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness.Kate Hamer grew up in Pembrokeshire and has recently been awarded a Literature Wales bursary. Her bestselling novel The Girl in the Red Coat was a no 3. Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award, the Bookseller Industry Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, the John Creasey New Blood Dagger and Wales Book of the Year. Her second novel is The Doll Funeral. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cordelia Fine is a Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of much-acclaimed A Mind of Its Own (Icon, 2006) and Delusions of Gender (Icon, 2010), described as ‘a truly startling book’ by the Independent, ‘fun, droll yet deeply serious’ by New Scientist and an ‘important book … as enjoyable as it is timely and interesting’ by the West Australian. Her latest book is Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds. This show also features a short interview with Nichi Hodgson on her book The Curious History of Dating. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The third and final Little Atoms Two Cultures in Conversation events took place in London on 17 January 2017, when Little Atoms’ Neil Denny was joined by novelist Naomi Alderman and science writer Adam Rutherford. Neil began by asking Naomi about her latest book, The Power. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. Her work appears in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Frieze and New York Times. She's a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow and was 2014 Eccles Writer in Residence at the British Library. Her first book, To the River, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award and the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize. Her latest book The Lonely City has been shortlisted for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize.Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York, Harper's, the Believer, Artforum, and the Nation, among many other publications. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he is the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, and a visiting scholar at New York University's Institute for Public Knowledge. He is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peter Swanson's debut novel, The Girl With a Clock for a Heart (2014), was described by Dennis Lehane as 'a twisty, sexy, electric thrill ride' and was nominated for the LA Times book award. His follow up The Kind Worth Killing (2015), a Richard and Judy pick, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and named the iBook stores Thriller of the Year. His latest novel is Her Every Fear. He lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chibundu Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1991. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is completing a PhD on the West African Student's Union at King's College London. Her latest novel is Welcome to Lagos.Alexandra Kleeman is a NYC-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Harpers, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. She is the author of the short story collection Intimations, and a debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Cumming has been the art critic of the Observer since 1999. Previously, she was Arts Editor for the New Statesman, presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3, and arts producer at the BBC World Service. Her previous book, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits received widespread critical acclaim. Laura’s latest book is The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Luke Dormehl is a journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film. He writes and has written for Fast Company, Wired, The Observer, Empire, SFX, The Sunday Times, Politico and Cult of Mac. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems (And Create More) and The Apple Revolution. Luke’s latest book is Thinking Machines: The inside story of Artificial Intelligence and our race to build the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded live at Waterstones Piccadilly on 1 December 2016, here's the last Little Atoms of 2016. Neil Denny chats with comedy legend Michael Palin about his book A Sackful of Limericks, followed by an audience Q&A. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Raoul Martinez is a writer, artist, and award-winning filmmaker. Creating Freedom is his first book. It is informed by over a decade of research and is accompanied by a documentary series of the same name. Episode One, The Lottery of Birth - produced, written and co-directed by Raoul - premiered in 2012. It was nominated for Best Documentary at London's Raindance Film Festival and went on to win the Artivist Spirit 2012 Award at Hollywood's Artivist Festival. It has been translated into several languages and the second film is currently in production. Raoul lives and works in London, where his paintings have been selected for exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With performance, presentation, music and discussion, Lucie Green and Simon Barraclough look at the different ways of understanding "a thing so simple a thing as a star".Poet Simon Barraclough, whose series Sunspots is the culmination of four years of writing, travelling, researching and obsessing over the Sun, and Lucie Green, author of 15 Million Degrees: journey to the centre of the Sun, and Professor of Physics and Royal Society University Research Fellow based at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL’s Department of Space and Climate Physics.The first of Little Atoms' Two Cultures autumn events series took place at Waterstones flagship store in Piccadilly, London, on 14 September 2016. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Czerski is a lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. As a physicist she studies the bubbles underneath breaking waves in the open ocean to understand their effects on weather and climate.Helen regularly presents BBC programmes on physics, the ocean and the atmosphere – recent series include Colour: The Spectrum of Science, Orbit, Operation Iceberg, Super Senses, Dara O’Briain’s Science Club, as well as programmes on bubbles, the sun and our weather. She is also a columnist for Focus magazine, shortlisted for PPA columnist of the year in 2014, and has written numerous articles for national newspapers. Helen's first book is Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign a­ffairs with more than 25 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics, and his latest book is Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He has written and presented many award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including the flagship weekly Radio 4 programme INSIDE SCIENCE, THE CELL for BBC Four, and PLAYING GOD on the rise of synthetic biology for the leading science strand HORIZON, as well as writing for the science pages of the GUARDIAN.His first book, CREATION, on the origin of life and synthetic biology, was published in 2013 to outstanding reviews and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize. Adam’s latest book is A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Ings began his career writing science fiction stories, novels and films, before widening his brief to explore perception (The Eye), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the shipping system (Dead Water) and augmented reality (Wolves). He co-founded and edited Arc magazine, a digital publication about the future, before joining New Scientist as its arts editor. Out of the office, he lives in possibly the coldest flat in London, writing for the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Independent and Nature. Simon's latest book is Stalin and The Scientists. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded live at the first London Podcast Festival at King’s Place, Guardian writer Hadley Freeman brings us her personalised guide to American movies from the 1980s – why they are brilliant, what they meant to her, and how they influenced movie-making forever. Growing up in New York in the 1980’s Hadley learned everything she knows from films like Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Top Gun, The Princess Bride, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Beverley Hills Copand When Harry Met Sally… We’ll be talking about how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about pop culture’s and society’s changing expectations of women, young people, masculinity, class and art, and explains why Pretty in Pink and Ghostbusters should be put on school syllabuses immediately. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Naomi Alderman is the author of four novels. In 2006 she won the Orange Award for New Writers, and in 2007 she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, as well as being selected as one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. All of her novels have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. In 2013 she was selected for the prestigious Granta Best of Young British Writers. Naomi's latest novel is The Power.Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Prize in 2009. She is the author of a novel, The Book of Memory, and now a second short story collection Rotten Row. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike Massimino served as an astronaut for NASA between 1996 and 2014, going on two Space Shuttle missions to service the Hubble telescope, spending more than 30 hours on spacewalks. He has appeared as himself on The Big Bang Theory and is now a professor at the University of Columbia. Mike is the author of a new memoir Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Frank is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's and a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler. His latest book is Listen, Liberal or, Whatever Happened to The Party of The People. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Greif studied history and literature at Harvard, and English at Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar. In 2004, he co-founded the literary journal n+1 in New York and has been a principal at the magazine since then. He earned a PhD in American studies from Yale in 2007. Since 2008, he has been on the faculty of the New School in New York, where he is currently an associate professor. His previous book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, was published in 2015. Greif has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and, for 2016–17, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Mark’s latest book is the essay collection Against Everything. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After graduating from West Point with a degree in Military Science, and from The University of Michigan with a Masters in Astronautical/Aeronautical Engineering, Colonel Alfred “Al” Worden had a career in the US Air Force as a fighter pilot and a test pilot, before joining NASA and becoming part of the Apollo program. Having served as a member of the astronaut support crew for the Apollo 9 flight and as backup Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 12 flight, Al Worden was chosen as Command Module Pilot for Apollo 15, becoming one of only 24 people to have flown to the moon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this interview from 2007, Neil and Padraig talked to journalist Nick Cohen about his book What's Left?, which examines the ideas of the British far left and their effects on mainstream politics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First broadcast 11 September 2009, Francis Wheen discusses Strange Days Indeed, his brilliant book on the mad, paranoid world of 70s politics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First broadcast on 14th January 2011Hailed as one of the most original non-fiction books in recent years, Francis Spufford's Red Plenty tells the story of the men and women who strived to deliver technological and economic Utopia for the Soviet Union in the Kruschev era Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mary Roach is the New York Times bestselling author of several popular science books, including Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Packing for Mars and Gulp. She has written for the Guardian, Wired, BBC Focus, GQ and Vogue. Her latest book is Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laurie Winkless is a physicist and writer, currently based in London. Following a degree at Trinity College Dublin, a placement at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre, and a masters in Space Science at UCL, Laurie worked at the National Physical Laboratory, specialising in materials. Laurie has been communicating science to the public for more than a decade, working with schools and universities, the Royal Society, Forbes, and the Naked Scientists, amongst others. She's given TEDx talks, hung out with astronauts, and appeared in The Times magazine as a leading light in STEM. Science and the City is her first book Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Travis Elborough is the author of four acclaimed books: The Bus We Loved, a history of the Routemaster bus; The Long Player Goodbye, which lamented the passing of vinyl; Wish You Were Here, a history of the British beside the seaside; and London Bridge in America, which tells the transatlantic story of the sale of the world's largest antique. Travis regularly appears on Radio 4 and writes for the Guardian. His latest book is A Walk in The Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maverick British filmmaker Alex Cox is responsible for directing a host of acclaimed films including Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Straight to Hell, Walker and Highway Patrolman. From 1987 to 1994, he presented the acclaimed BBC TV series ‘Moviedrome’, bringing unknown or forgotten films to new audiences. He’s also the author of X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, 10,000 Ways to Die, and The President and the Provocateur, and has written on the subject of film for publications including Sight and Sound, The Guardian, The Independent and Film Comment. His latest book is Alex Cox’s Introduction to Film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cal Flyn is a freelance journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. She has been a reporter for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. She has been published in the New Statesman, The Observer, The Independent, Telegraph Magazine and FT Weekend, and won the 2013 Brandt/Independent on Sunday travel writing prize. Her first book is Thicker Than Water. Dan Richards studied at UEA and Norwich Arts School. He is co-author of Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood, and The Beechwood Airship Interviews, a book about the creative process and the importance of art for art’s sake, which we talked about last year on Little Atoms. His latest book is Climbing Days. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Marshall is a journalist who writes about music and politics. He has written previously for the BBC, Guardian and New York Times. Alex is the author of Republic or Death! Travels in Search of National Anthems. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miranda Sawyer is a journalist and broadcaster. Formerly of Smash Hits and Select, she currently writes features and radio criticism for the Observer, and her writing has also appeared in GQ, Vogue and the Guardian. She is a regular arts critic in print, on television and on radio. The author of Park and Ride, a book about suburbia, her latest is Out of Time: Midlife, If You Still Think You’re Young. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marcus Du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 2008 he was appointed to Oxford University’s prestigious professorship as the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, a post previously held by Richard Dawkins. In 2009 the Royal Society awarded him the Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to the public, and in 2010 he received an OBE from the Queen for his services to science. He’s also recently been made a fellow of the Royal Society. Marcus is the author of The Music of The Primes, Finding Moonshine and The Number Mysteries; He’s presented numerous programs on TV and radio including the internationally acclaimed BBC series The Story of Maths and in 2006 gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. His latest book is What We Cannot Know. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Louise Doughty is the author of seven novels, most recently the top 5 bestseller Apple Tree Yard, which was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club, shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards Crime & Thriller of the Year and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, longlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, and translated into over twenty languages. Her other novels include Whatever You Love, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers and broadcasts regularly for the BBC. Her latest novel is Black Water. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francis Spufford was born in 1964. He is the author of five highly-praised books of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either 'bizarre' or 'brilliant', and usually as both. Unapologetic, has been translated into three languages; the one before, Red Plenty, into nine. He has been longlisted or shortlisted for prizes in science writing, historical writing, political writing, theological writing, and writing 'evoking the spirit of place'. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge. His latest book is his first novel, Golden Hill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kate Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling writer with more than a decade's experience in writing across varying genres, including memoir and biography and history. She is the author of The Radium Girls, and previously she was the director of the critically acclaimed play about The Radium Girls called 'These Shining Lives'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Wray is the author of The Right Hand of Sleep, which won a Whiting Writers' Award, Canaan's Tongue and the critically-acclaimed Lowboy. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. His latest novel is The Lost Time Accidents. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded live at the Stoke Newington Literary festival, we gathered together the crème of UK literary podcasting and put them on the same stage, and inevitably they talked about books; With Andy Miller (Backlisted), Carrie Plitt & Octavia Bright (Literary Friction), our own Neil Denny, and occasional remote interjections from Robin Ince (Book Shambles). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lucy Jones is a nature writer and journalist based in London. She was Deputy Editor at NME.com and previously worked at the Daily Telegraph. Her writing on culture, science and nature has been published in BBC Earth, BBC Wildlife, the Guardian, TIME and the New Statesman, and she has contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 4, 6 Music and Radio 1, the BBC World Service, VICE, Channel 5 and Channel 4. She runs the Wildlife Daily blog, featuring wildlife, nature and environment news from around the world, and is the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Roger Deakin Award for Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain, which is her first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, where he researches the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He received his PhD in 1983 from Harvard University, and has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation and the Royal Society. He is the author of From Eternity to Here, and The Particle at the End of the Universe among other books, his latest being The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Katie Roiphe is the author of several books, including The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, Uncommon Arrangements, and In Praise of Messy Lives. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Slate, and Tin House, among many other places. She has a Ph.D. in literature from Princeton University, and is currently the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Her latest book is The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duncan Campbell is a former crime correspondent of the Guardian, former chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association and winner of the Bar Council’s newspaper journalist of the year. He has also written for the Observer, New Statesman, London Review of Books, Oldie, Esquire, Los Angeles Weekly and British Journalism Review. He was the original presenter of Crime Desk on BBC Radio 5 Live, presented the Radio 4 documentary Bandits of the Blitz, has appeared on the Today programme, LBC radio and numerous television documentaries, and has lectured and spoken widely on crime reporting. He is the author of six books including the bestselling The Underworld and an acclaimed crime novel, If it Bleeds. His latest book is We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds! The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rowan Moore is the architecture critic for the Observer and previously for the Evening Standard. He is also a trained architect, and between 2002 and 2008 was the Director of the Architecture Foundation. His award winning book Why We Build was published by Picador in 2012. In 2014 he was named Critic of the Year by the UK Press Awards. His latest book is Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Josh Neicho speaks to Ben Judah, Heather Kennedy and Martin Skinner about housing, the hottest issue of the London mayoral campaign.Ben Judah is a journalist and author of This Is London, about the migrant experience of LondonHeather Kennedy is an organiser of Digs, a private renters' campaign group in Hackney which is part of the Radical Housing NetworkMartin Skinner is a micro-apartment developer who is CEO of Inspired Asset Management and Inspired Homes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our second London mayoral election special, Josh Niecho and his panel discuss the issues affecting London's young and diverse community.Featuring:Kenny Imafidon is author of the award-winning Kenny Reports and Partnerships & Programmes Co-ordinator of Bite The Ballot. He lives in south London - kennyimafidon.com, @KennyImafidonShelly Asquith is Vice President (Welfare) of the National Union of Students, and former SU President of the University of the Arts - @ShellyAsquithAmina Gichinga is Take Back The City London Assembly candidate for City & East. She runs a community choir near the Royal Docks - @aminaminkyDia Chakravarty is political director of the Taxpayers' Alliance and a singer. She was born and educated until sixth-form in Bangladesh, and moved to London aged 24 - @DiaChakravarty Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen Trombley's most recent books are Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World (2012) and A Short History of Western Thought (2011). For 15 years he co-edited The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought with Alan Bullock. His latest book is Wise Words: The Philosophy of Everyday Life. This show also features a catch up with Johann Hari on the paperback release of his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of The War on Drugs. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexander Jan leads the City Economics team at engineering and consultancy firm Arup and is a columnist for City AMAlex Ingram is a cycling campaigner with groups in Lewisham and Islington and with national campaigns. He blogs at Alex in the Cities(alexinthecities.co.uk)Kate Arnell is a TV presenter who currently presents BBC America's Anglophenia. She has a blog oneco-living at EcoBoost (eco-boost.co)Jonn Elledge is a journalist and edits New Statesman's urbanism magazine site (citymetric.com). He presents CityMetric's Skylines podcast (citymetric.com/content/skylines-podcast) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The last of our three shows for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize, with shortlisted authors Steve Silberman & Sarah Moss. The Wellcome Book Prize 2016 winner will be announced on Monday 25th April. Thanks again to Chris, Alice and Fiona at FMcM Associates for arranging these interviews.Steve Silberman is an award-winning investigative reporter and has covered science and cultural affairs for Wired and other national magazines for more than twenty years. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, TIME, Nature and Salon. Steve is the author of the New York Times bestseller Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, which won the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and is shortlisted for the 2106 Wellcome Book Prize.Sarah Moss was educated at Oxford University and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. She is the author of three novels: Cold Earth, Night Waking, which was selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, and Bodies of Light which was shortlisted for the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize. She spent 2009-10 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Reykjavik, and wrote an account of her time there in Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (Granta 2012), which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2013. Sarah’s latest novel is Signs for Lost Children, which is shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, first working at The Royal London Hospital and now as a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, and for a specialist unit based at the Epilepsy Society. In that role she has developed an expertise in working with patients with psychogenic disorders alongside her work with those suffering with physical diseases such as epilepsy. Suzanne’s first book It's All in Your Head, is shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize in 2016.Amy Liptrot has published her work with various magazines, journals and blogs and she has written a regular column for Caught by the River out of which her first book The Outrun emerged. As well as writing for local newspaper, Orkney Today, and editing the Edinburgh Student newspaper, Amy has worked as an artist's model, a trampolinist and in a shellfish factory. The Outrun is shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first of three shows for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize, with shortlisted authors Cathy Rentzenbrink & Alex Pheby.Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, Grew up in Yorkshire and now lives in London. A former bookseller at Waterstones, she was until recently Project Director of the charity Quick Reads, and is currently books editor at the Bookseller magazine. Her first book, The Last Act of Love, has been shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize.Alex Pheby is a writer and academic. He is the co-founder and co-director of the annual Greenwich Book Festival, and is the programme leader of the University of Greenwich's creative writing programmes. His first novel, Grace, was published in 2009, and his latest novel Playthings is shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A recording of the first Little Atoms live event at Waterstones Piccadilly in which we host the launch of Mollly Crabapple’s book Drawing Blood. An acclaimed artist and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Paris Review, and in her regular column in Vice (among many other venues), Molly Crabapple has swiftly become one of the most provocative – and most-watched – voices at work today.Now, in her memoir, DRAWING BLOOD, Crabapple weaves together her fresh voice and acutely observed perspective with dazzling, irreverent, full colour illustrations. This singular artist traces how the power of art, which gripped her from childhood, has given her a vehicle for understanding – perhaps even for changing – the world. Hear Molly in conversation with acclaimed broadcaster Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Penderyn Music Book Prize is organised by Richard Thomas, founder of the Laugharne Weekend Festival, and is the only UK-based book prize specifically for music titles including history, theory, biography and autobiography. The winner will be announced at the Laugharne Weekend Festival on 3rd April 2016. In this special edition of Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks with shortlisted authors Stuart Cosgrove and Peter Doggett, and prize judge Jude Rogers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ioan Grillo has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media including Time magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle, the BBC World Service and the Sunday Telegraph.His first book, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, was translated into five languages and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orwell Prize.A native of Britain, Grillo lives in Mexico City. His latest book is Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

DJ Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. He has written eleven novels, the most recent being The Windsor Faction. He’s also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945. His journalism appears in the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, The Tablet, the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and, anonymously, in Private Eye. His latest book is The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the last two years Little Atoms has partnered with the Wellcome Book Prize, broadcasting interviews with the shortlisted authors. We’ll be doing the same this year, and to mark the announcement of the 2016 shortlist on Monday 14th March, here’s a bonus episode. This is a recording of a conversation between previous winners Andrew Solomon and Marion Coutts, which took place at Libreria bookshop on 2nd March. Libreria director Sally Davies is the host. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Parker grew up in Wiltshire. He was educated at Falmouth College of Art and University College London. He joined the British Army when he was 23 and served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009 as a Captain. He is now a writer and artist and lives in London. Harry’s first novel is Anatomy of a Soldier. Andrew Hankinson is a journalist who was born, raised, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He started his career as a staff writer at Arena magazine and in 2012 won a Northern Writers Award. He is now a freelance feature writer who has contributed to many publications, including Observer Magazine, The Guardian, and Huffington Post. His first book is You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist based in London. She has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London, and an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College London. She has worked as an editor at New Scientist and at Nature and her articles have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Wired, and The Observer Review. She’s the author of Decoding the Heavens, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, and The Shadow King. Her latest book is Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maria Konnikova was born in Moscow, Russia and came to the United States when she was four years old. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a regular column with a focus on psychology and culture, and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Observer, and Scientific American, among numerous other publications. She is the author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes and her latest book is The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con, and Why we Fall For it Every Time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a PhD then a postdoc at the University of York before realising that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than spending hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. She went on to run outreach in engineering, computing, physics and maths at the University of Surrey, and is now a freelance science communicator delivering talks and workshops on the quirky side of science. Kathryn is the author of A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely (2007) and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including My Last Confession (2009), The Donor (2011) and most recently The Cry (2013), which was longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Helen has worked as a criminal justice social worker for over ten years. Now based in Scotland, she grew up in Victoria, Australia as one of thirteen children. Her latest novel is Viral. This show also features a repeat of our recent interview with Francesca Kay on her novel The Long Room. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matthew Kneale studied Modern History at Oxford University. He is the author of several novels, including English Passengers which won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest book is An Atheist’s History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention. Also this week, columnist Suzanne Moore on A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philip Hoare is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed biography of Noel Coward, and Leviathan or, The Whale, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011. He is also co-curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read. His latest book, The Sea Inside, was published by Fourth Estate in June 2013. Also this week, columnist Deborah Orr talks about Kate Bush’s debut album The Kick Inside. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rana Dasgupta won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury in 1971, he has lived in Delhi for 13 years. Also this week, writer Sarah Ditum talks about Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review,Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain. His latest books are Landscapes of Communism, and The Ministry of Nostalgia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A special edition of Little Atoms for Resonance FM’s fundraising week. Recorded live at The Slaughtered Lamb on 10th February 2014.Is Music Journalism in a Critical Condition?The UK music scene once supported four weekly music papers, which wielded the power to form the musical agenda in a way that’s unimaginable today. Of these, only the NME staggers on in managed decline, along with an ever dwindling number of monthly magazines. The changing ways we consume music and the rise of the internet have radically changed the musical landscape, and perhaps this is a good thing. Those weeklies were notoriously bad at covering certain genres, and the internet has enabled a much wider range of writers to share the music they love. On the other hand it has yet to find a reliable way to pay them to do so. Are the days of making a living from music journalism over?Joining Neil Denny of the Little Atoms Radio Show to explore this question, and to share tales of private jets and rainy nights at the Northampton Roadmender, are the journalists Andrew Mueller, Charles Shaar Murray, Jude Rogers and David Stubbs.Andrew Mueller is a rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist, pundit and author. He is a Contributing Editor at Monocle, and also writes for The Guardian, The Telegraph, Uncut, and The New Humanist among others. His latest book is the memoir It’s Too Late to Die Young Now. When not writing, Andrew Mueller is the singer and songwriter with alt-country band The Blazing Zoos. Defunct music papers he’s written words for include Melody Maker, Vox and The Word.Charles Shaar Murray is an author, broadcaster and former NME journalist. He is the author of several books, most recently Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop. A founding contributor to Q and Mojo magazines, he made his print debut in 1970 in the notorious “Schoolkids Issue” OZ. Currently he’s a regular contributor to Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge on Resonance FM.Jude Rogers is a columnist and music writer for The Guardian, Observer, The Quietus and the New Statesman. She’s the co-founder of quarterly magazine Smoke: A London Peculiar. She’s been on the Mercury Music Prize judging panel since 2007. Her radio documentary Mad About the Boy was on Radio 4 at the beginning of February.David Stubbs joined the music magazine Melody Maker in 1986, where he worked for 12 years. His most famous creation, Mr Agreeablehas recently reawakened over at The Quietus. He has also written for The Guardian, NME, The Wire, When Saturday Comes and Uncut, and was a presenter of the Resonance FM football show Café Calcio. David is the author of numerous books, including the upcoming Future Days, a history of Krautrock which is published in August by Faber. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Aleks writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast. She presented the Emmy and Bafta-winning BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution, and more recently the BBC Radio 4 series Digital Human. Her first book is Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You. Also this week, critic Matthew Sweet on the Ealing WW2 propaganda film Went The Day Well? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology. In 2011, he coined the term “New Aesthetic”, and his ongoing research around this subject has been featured and discussed worldwide. His work, such as the Iraq War Historiography, an encyclopaedia of Wikipedia Changelogs, has been exhibited at galleries in the Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and has been commissioned by organisations such as Artangel, Mu Eindhoven, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC.Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality. Eleanor is Principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP), directing the OpenITP Peer Review Board for open source software and working on adversary modeling. She is also Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), a member of the advisory boards at Geeks Without Bounds (GWoB) and the Calyx Institute, and works on occasion as a Senior Security Associate with Stach & Liu. She is a founder of the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (CAST), previously co-founded the Seattle-based Public N3rd Area hacker space, and works on the Trike and Briar projects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Irving Finkel is an archaeologist and Assyriologist, currently Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He’s also an expert on the history of board games, and the founder of the Great Diary Project. Irving is the author of numerous books, most recently The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Also on this week’s show, astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much distortion. Influenced by a technologically dystopian present and an apocalyptically likely future, they tend to be found filling venues, galleries or headphones with different kinds of noise in their ongoing efforts to find the limits of what ‘being a band’ can mean.The Space Lady is a street-performing singer based in Colorado, USA. Originally beginning on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, she has recently begun playing again. Often seen performing in 1980’s Boston, and then a decade later in San Francisco’s Castro community – where she would play and sing for hours on end for the gay scene, and got her apt moniker – The Space Lady’s winged helmet and setup of a Casio battery-powered keyboard, vocal mic and echo & phaser controls became a small but striking phenomenon. Her sound is a blend of synth-laden pop and proto-techno that evokes the iconic soundtrack artists and early electronic composers such as Suzanne Ciani. The Space Lady has been recognised alongside Daniel Johnston and Jandek on Irwin Chusid’s seminal Outsider compilation Songs in the Key of Z, and her lo-fi synth minimalist interpretation of Peter Schilling’s Major Tom featured on Erol Alkan’s Bugged Out mix last year, as well as John Maus’ 2011 Rough Trade set. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He later ran consular operations in France and North Africa for the Australian embassy, liaising with international authorities on cases involving murder, kidnap, terrorism and disappearances. His fiction includes the collection of short stories, Out From the Past, and his film work includes writing the feature film Samsara. His debut novel is Fever City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Fleetwood is the founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. Hide&Seek started life in 2007 as a festival of social games and playful experiences on London’s South Bank, and built into a studio occupied a unique position in the UK, creating innovative games, installations and events with organisations including Film4, the Cultural Olympiad, Tate Modern, Warner Bros, Gâité Lyrique, Nike, Sony, the Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace.Anab Jain was born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, and founded Superflux in 2009, leading the Consultancy’s client partnerships whilst balancing the Lab’s self-initiated conceptual projects. She has lead multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations such as Sony, BBC, Nokia, NHS, Design Council, Forum for the Future, Qatar Foundation and Govt. of UAE. Honoured as a TED Fellow, she is the recipient of several awards, including the Award of Excellence ICSID and Apply Computers, Innovation Award, Chicago International Film Festival and the UNESCO Digital Arts Award. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, Apple, Mattel Toys, Tate Modern, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China and the London Design Festival. She is on the Board of MzTek and Broadway Cinema and Media Centre, and is a guest lecturer at the Royal College of Art, VCUQatar, Architectural Association, Goldsmiths, Dundee Innovative Product Design and CIID. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olivia Laing‘s first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She’s a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and has received awards from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. Olivia ‘s latest book is The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andy Miller is a reader, author and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Esquire and Mojo. He’s the author of Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport, among others. His latest book is The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed 2011 novel So Much Pretty. She grew up in northern Appalachia, where she dropped out of high school to work full time. Hoffman spent three years travelling and working as an agricultural labourer in Europe and the Middle East. She returned to the US, had a baby and found a job delivering newspapers which eventually led to work as a reporter covering environmental politics and crime. She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford, where she lectured on Violence and Masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. Hoffman lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College. Cara ‘s latest novel is Be Safe I Love You. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Neil Denny talks to Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall about her new book Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs, and then Francesca Kay on her latest novel The Long Room.Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards and honours and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the author of numerous books including Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe. Her latest book is Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.Francesca Kay's first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers and was nominated for the Authors' Club First Novel Award and for Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe and South Asia Region). Her second novel, The Translation of the Bones, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is The Long Room. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday, and the novel The Canal, which won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2010. He is writer in residence at Kingston University, where he is an MFA lecturer in creative writing and critical theory. He also lectures in creative writing at the University of East London. His latest novel is Vulgar Things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Following a doctorate and subsequent research career in genetics, Kat Arney is now Science Communications Manager for Cancer Research UK, where she translates science into plain English to help people understand more about the disease. Kat is also a science writer and broadcaster, whose writing has appeared in the Guardian, Science, New Scientist, BBC Online and Al-Jazeera Online.She has presented several BBC Radio 4 science documentaries and programmes in the Costing the Earth series, is a regular presenter with the Naked Scientists, and presents and produces the Naked Genetics monthly podcast. Kat’s first book is Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this interview, recorded in Oxford ahead of the release of "God Is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens spoke to Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy about Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, religion, blasphemy and nuclear apocalypse Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer, best known for the Guardian’s “Transgender Journey”—the first time the gender reassignment process had been serialised for a major British publication. Her column was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011. She was included in the Independent’s Pink List for the last four years, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. She has also written for Granta, TimeOut, Filmwaves, 3am, the London Review of Books, the New Humanist, the New Inquiry, and many other publications. She is the author of Trans: A Memoir. This is the 400th edition of Little Atoms, and Neil is joined by former host Becky Hogge in conversation with Juliet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lucy Inglis is a historian, novelist, and occasional television presenter. In 2009 she created the Georgian London blog, which became the largest free body of work on the eighteenth century city online, which became a book, Georgian London: Into the Streets. She’s currently working on a book about Opium. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peter Pomerantsev is an award-winning TV producer and a contributor to the London Review of Books. His writing has been published in the Financial Times,New Yorker,Wall Street Journal,Foreign Policy,Daily Beast, Newsweek,Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. He has also worked as a consultant for the EU and World Bank. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jon Savage is the author of England's Dreaming: Sex pistols and Punk Rock and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875 - 1945. He is the writer of the award winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1998) and Joy Division (2007) as well as the feature film of Teenage (2014). His latest book is 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta. His first book Grief is the Thing With Feathers has been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2015 and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2015. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Man Booker shortlisted novelist Hanya Yanagihara on A Little Life and journalist Antony Loewenstein on Disaster Capitalism.Hanya Yanagihara is the author of The People in the Trees, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her latest novel A Little Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She was until recently the Deputy Editor at the New York Times’ T Magazine, and she lives in New York City.Antony Loewenstein is an independent Australian journalist, documentary maker and blogger who has written for the BBC, the Nation and the Washington Post. He’s a weekly Guardian columnist and the author of three best-selling books, My Israel Question,The Blogging Revolution and Profits of Doom: How Vulture Capitalism is Swallowing the World. His latest book is Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, and he’s currently working on a documentary about disaster capitalism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, a Live Little Atoms event. Authors Emma Jane Unsworth and Zoe Lambert in conversation with Neil Denny at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on Friday 25th September. Zoe Lambert is a Manchester based writer. She lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University, and has published numerous short stories in anthologies.  Her debut […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history: Bloodlands won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The last of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, ahead of the award ceremony on Thursday 24th September. This week Neil Denny talks with Matthew Cobb, and there’s a repeat of our interview with Alex Bellos from May 2014. The show also includes a short […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The second of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. This week Neil Denny talks with David Adam, and there’s a repeat of our interview with Gaia Vince from August 2014. This show also marks the 10th anniversary of Little Atoms. We first broadcast on […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. This week Neil Denny talks with shortlisted authors Jim Al-Khalili & Johnjoe Mcfadden, and Jon Butterworth. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, OBE is an academic, author and broadcaster. He is a leading theoretical physicist based at the […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Prize in 2009. Her debut novel is The Book of Memory. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Higgs is the author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, and the novel The Brandy of the Damned. His latest book is Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michela Wrong is a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. She writes regularly for Foreign Policy magazine and the Spectator. Based on her experiences in Africa, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, her first book, won the […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen Grey is a journalist based in London, who writes mainly about national security issues. He is best known for breaking the international exclusive story of the CIA’s secret rendition program. A former editor on the Sunday Times’ investigations unit, the Insight team, he continues to contribute to that newspaper, as well to the New […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alok Jha is a journalist and broadcaster based in London. He is science correspondent for ITN and, before that, was science correspondent at the Guardian. He has presented science programmes for BBC2 and BBC Radio 4. Alok received a science-writing award from the American Institute of Physics in 2014, was named European Science Writer of […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Scales is a marine biologist, a freelance researcher and broadcaster; she appears regularly on BBC Radio 4, Sky News and the BBC World Service, and has presented documentaries on topics such as whether people will ever live underwater, the science of making and surfing waves and the intricacies of sharks’ minds. Her doctorate involved […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iain Sinclair a poet, film-maker, essayist and the author of many acclaimed books, including Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, Edge of Orison, Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, Dining on Stones, Ghost Milk and American Smoke and London Overground, his account of a one-day walk around […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, where he studied under John Keegan. A regular officer with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army to write. He has published four novels, and numerous works of non-fiction. His books include The Spanish Civil War;  Crete — The Battle and the Resistance, which was awarded a […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms, Dylan Evans on The Utopia Experiment, and Andrew Mueller on his memoir It’s Too Late to Die Young Now. Dylan Evans is an academic, philosopher and journalist. He has written several popular science books, was named by the Independent as one of the 20 best young writers in Britain, and […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nell Zink was born in 1964 in southern California and grew up in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she majored in philosophy. Rather late in life she got a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen, Germany. She works as a translator for […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emma Jane Unsworth is a journalist and won the Betty Trask Award for her novel Hungry, the Stars and Everything, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Portico Prize. Her short story ‘I Arrive First’ was included in The Best British Short Stories 2012. Emma’s latest novel Animals has won a 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. After […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nick Lane is a biochemist in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London and leads the UCL Origins of Life Programme. His first book, Oxygen, was one of the Sunday Times Books of the Year in 2002. Power, Sex, Suicide was named as a book of the year in The Economist in 2005 and was short-listed for The Aventis […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's Little Atoms Podcast, Joanna Biggs on her book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, and Stevan Alcock on his novel Blood Relatives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to Dr Gavin Francis about his latest book is Adventures in Human Being. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's Little Atoms, Pulitzer Prize-winning Photojournalist Lynsey Addario on her Memoir It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, two books about Death. Brandy Schillace on Death’s Summer Coat, and Caitlin Doughty on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Dr Brandy Schillace writes about culture, the history of medicine, and the intersections of medicine and literature. She is Research Associate and guest curator for the Dittrick Medical History Center […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The day before the most uninspiring General Election in Decades, we talk to Zoe Williams about her new book Get it Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil Denny talks to two more shortlisted writers, Henry Marsh and Marion Coutts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Wednesday 29th April the winner of the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize will be announced. In the first of two special editions of Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to three of the shortlisted writers. This week: Miriam Toews, Scott Stossell and Sarah Moss. Miriam Toews was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to New York writer Christopher Bollen about his new novel Orient. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms, Susan Pinker on her book The Village Effect, and Gary Wilson on his book Your Brain on Porn. Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist and award-winning newspaper columnist who writes about psychology and social science in the Globe and Mail. She has worked as a clinical psychologist for twenty-five years […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego. He has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton. His many publications include Museums of Madness; Social Order/Mental Disorder; The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900; Masters of Bedlam; Madhouse: A Tragic Tale […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Dennis Reuter is a New Horizons co-investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the instrument scientist for Ralph, the New Horizons color imager and infrared spectrometer. New Horizons launched on 19th January 2006 and is scheduled to fly-by Pluto and its moons in July 2015. This is another interview recorded by Little Atoms […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Hannah Fry on The Mathematics of Love and Jon Ronson on his latest book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Dr. Hannah Fry is a mathematician and complexity scientist from University College London’s Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Fry also regularly presents the Number Hub strand of BBC Worldwide’s YouTube […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms, two interviews. Neil Denny talks to Salena Godden about her memoir Springfield Road, and to Kate Hamer about her debut novel The Girl in the Red Coat. Salena Godden writes and performs poetry, fiction, memoir, radio drama and lyrics. Her latest book of poems, Fishing in the Aftermath, was published in […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s Little Atoms is a special edition recorded at FutureEverything 20 in Manchester on 26th and 27th February 2015. The show features a long interview recorded live in front of an audience with writer, researcher and activist Alice Bell, and shorter interviews with FutureEverything CEO and founder Drew Hemment, Sonic Pi creator Sam Aaron, Hack […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arthur I. Miller is emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Einstein, Picasso, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Empire of the Stars, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books, and 137, which we’re discussed on […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Late last year, Little Atoms took part in an audio installation, Mind’s Eye, which consisted of a number of interviews with scientists involved in current space missions. Mind’s Eye is now on tour, and can been heard from 16th to 22nd February as part of Smashfest UK at the Albany Theatre in Deptford. Here are […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Greg Jenner is the Historical Consultant to CBBC’s multi-award winning Horrible Histories, Horrible Histories with Stephen Fry, and the various HH spin-offs. As well as contributing sketches and co-writing Stephen Fry’s links, over the past four years he has been solely responsible for the factual accuracy of nearly one thousand comedy sketches with subject matter […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Stubbs joined the music magazine Melody Maker in 1986, where he worked for 12 years. His most famous creation, Mr Agreeable periodically reawakens over at The Quietus. He has also written for The Guardian, NME, The Wire, When Saturday Comes and Uncut, and was a presenter of the Resonance FM football show Café Calcio. […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Edward Slingerland is an internationally recognized expert in both early Chinese thought and the links between cognitive science and the humanities. He is Professor of Asian Studies, Associate Member in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. He […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Johann Hari is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the LA Times, the Guardian,Le Monde, Slate, the New Republic and The Nation among others. He was a columnist on the Independent for nine years and was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He has also been named […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Blast and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents, London Noir and Krautrock. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The last Little Atoms of 2014, recorded at QI headquarters in somewhere in Covent Garden, with QI Head of Research James Harkin and the QI Elves – Anne Miller, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski and Alex Bell. We’re mostly talking about the latest QI book, 1,411 QI Facts to Knock You Sideways, but are often […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Little Atoms, two prize-winning novelists. Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel, which has been […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, academic, broadcaster and science writer who has made his name unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims from journalists, politicians, quacks and drug companies. His Bad Science column ran in the Guardian from 2003 to 2011. His first book, Bad Science, was a number one bestseller, selling over half a million […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Little Atoms, two philosophical interviews: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University. Her award-winning books include the novels The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and nonfiction studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. She has […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Little Atoms, two novels that blur the boundaries between truth and Fiction. David Flusfeder was born in New Jersey but grew up in London. He’s the author of numerous novels, including, A Film by Spencer Ludwig, The Pagan House, The Gift and Like Plastic, which won the Encore Award 1997. He […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Brooks is the author of the bestselling non-fiction titles 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense and Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. He holds a PhD in quantum physics, is a consultant at New Scientist and writes a weekly column for the New Statesman. His latest book is At the Edge of Uncertainty: […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marina Keegan (1989 – 2012) was an author, journalist, playwright, poet, actress and activist, and for two years a research assistant to Harold Bloom, all before she graduated from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author and cultural commentator for more than a decade now. His books include The Bus We Loved, a history of the Routemaster bus; The Long Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records; and Wish You Were Here, a survey of the British beside the seaside. His latest book […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel Cooke is a journalist, writing for The Observer, where her features and interviews have won several awards. She is also the television critic of the New Statesman. Her first book is Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Ward‘s blog, I Like Boring Things, has featured in the Independent, Observer and on the BBC website. He is co-founder of Stationery Club and London’s annual Boring Conference, a one-day celebration of the ordinary and the overlooked, as featured everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Radio 4. His first book is Adventures in Stationery: […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The last of three special editions of Little Atoms from Mind’s Eye, an audio installation at Brighton Digital Festival, featuring a number of interviews with space people. The third show features interviews with former Space Shuttle astronaut Gerhard Thiele, Dr Helen Mason of the University of Cambridge on the Sun, and Professor Carl Murray of […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The  second of three special editions of Little Atoms from Mind’s Eye, an audio installation at Brighton Digital Festival, featuring a number of interviews with space people. The second show features interviews with Sandra Cauffman, Deputy Project Manager of MAVEN, Hakan Svedhem, Project Scientist on Venus Express, and Dr Katherine Joy of the University of […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.