Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious
Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul
Megan McCubbin, a familiar face to viewers of the BBC’s Springwatch and Animal Park, is a passionate and eloquent champion of wildlife and one of Britain’s foremost young naturalists. Having grown up in and around the Isle of Wight Zoo, and travelled the world on assignment with step-dad and now fellow Springwatch presenter Chris Packham...
Claire Fuller: Polpo fiction
Claire Fuller’s latest novel The Memory of Animals imagines a near-future London paralysed by a devastating pandemic that has wiped out much of the world’s population. The narrator Neffy, a marine biologist with an obsessive interest in cephalopods, is among a band of young, healthy volunteers in a vaccine trial. At the beginning of the...
Kate Simants: Extreme reality
Reality TV is dead! Long live reality TV! And so it goes. Just when we think audiences have had enough, and production companies are scraping the barrel for ideas, along comes another surprise that grips the nation. This winter, it was The Traitors that got the whole nation talking – and not just about how Claudia Winkelman...
Translators Aloud: Charlotte Coombe and Tina Kover
In May 2020, in the early months of the first Covid-19 lockdown, Tina Kover posted on Twitter that she was considering uploading a video of herself reading from one of her translations but wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in watching such a thing. Amid a flurry of replies, fellow translator Charlie Coombe suggested...
Ann-Helén Laestadius: Lost lands and lost lives
Ann-Helén Laestadius’ Stolen is a forceful story of a young Sámi woman battling to preserve the lifestyle and traditions of reindeer herders in Sweden amid a wave of torture and massacre of the animals on whose livelihood they depend. At the age of nine, Elsa witnesses the aftermath of the brutal killing of her favourite...
‘Love you, man’
Will Schwalbe’s multi-decade memoir We Should Not Be Friends kicks off at Yale in the early eighties, when the author is selected for membership in a secret society (no, not that Yale secret society) for his senior year. Looking back at his initiation into the group, Schwalbe describes his impressions of his fellow inductees; one in particular, wrestling-team star...
Robbie Arnott: Untamed nature
In the heat of a Tasmanian summer, with the world at war and his brothers away on secretive missions in the Pacific, 15-year-old Ned West traps, shoots and skins rabbits to sell their pelts in the hope of saving to buy a small boat. As his father and older sister struggle to keep the riverside...
Pascal Engman: Contact at any price
According to Wikipedia, an incel, or involuntary celibate, is “a member of an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one.” United by a lethal form of misogyny, male adherents are becoming increasingly emboldened. Deadly attacks from Toronto to Tallahassee and Santa Barbara are...
Rijula Das: The constant smallness of being
Set in Calcutta’s notorious red-light district Sonagachi, Rijula Das’s debut Small Deaths resists lazy stereotypes. Years of research have provided Das with an intimate understanding of the power dynamics at play between the madams, pimps and police, and how their often-cruel manoeuvrings have devastating consequences for the endless stream of girls and young women trafficked...
Amanda Lees: Her secret service
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the virtues of dedication, service and sacrifice in the wake of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The internet is flooded with photos of her in her youth. The ones of her in uniform training to become a driver and mechanic during the Second World War are as inspirational today...
Ambreen Razia: Mums and daughters
Ambreen Razia’s remarkable new play Favour at the Bush Theatre, co-directed by Róisín McBrinn of Clean Break and Sophie Dillon Moniram, plots the troubled return to family life of single mum Aleena (Avita Jay) after a spell in prison. While she was away, her teenage daughter Leila (Ashna Rabheru) was in the care of her...
