Riots, rhymes and reason
I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society. Some of my early work dealt with fratricidal violence and internecine warfare, not too dissimilar...
Mudlarking for mannerisms
It’s I Spy meets solitaire: a solo diversion that helps to pass the time in doctors’ waiting rooms and tedious meetings. I’ve done it in train carriages and post office queues; sitting on an undersized plastic chair before the curtain rises on a school nativity play. I thought everyone did. But I’ve come to understand...
A dreadful fascination
The true tales of murder that feature in Great and Horrible News cover a period of some 200 years, from approximately 1500 to 1700. It was a time that encompassed the rise and fall of the Houses of the Tudors and the Stuarts, the English Civil War, the Protectorate, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. England split...
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...
Becoming a writer
My twentieth novel, Reservoir, is a psychological thriller about memory, secrets and shame. My central character Hannah has reinvented herself in order to escape her past. Like me, she has moved from a working-class background into a profession that is traditionally middle class – in her case it is psychotherapy rather than writing. At a recent...
“An unspeakable hell” – subversive spaces in literature
This is a collection of uncanny places, of nasty, squirming, blackened spaces. In the traditional haunted house, we place the blame for fear or hysteria or death squarely on the draped and ethereal shoulders of a ghost. They pass through walls and shriek in the bathrooms and lurk beneath the beds, causing all sorts of...
Roughly organised, somewhat scattered
Cecile Pin’s exceptional debut novel Wandering Souls is a beautiful and haunting look at the plight of Vietnamese refugees in 1970s France. Partly based on her mother’s experience of coming to the country as a refugee, it’s about identity, loss and trying to find a feeling of belonging – a very human picture of the sacrifices and...
Virginia Woolf and science fiction
They rode in the dark, arriving at Yorkshire in the pre-dawn. The Astronomer Royal had set up a camp directly on the line of totality. In Southport, on the beach, a quarter of a million people gathered. Woolf and her group left their train and walked uphill towards Richmond. Everybody waited. The sun came up,...
Approaching The Peckham Experiment
Five and a half years after the appalling tragedy of Grenfell Tower, the public inquiry has finally completed more than 300 public hearings. Richard Millett KC, counsel to the inquiry, declared: “Each and every one of the deaths that occurred… was avoidable.” He mapped out the way the companies, authorities and individuals involved had all...
F. Scott Fitzgerald bathes in the light on the French Riviera
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1896–1940) literary brilliance as the witty and worldly-wise chronicler of the Jazz Age and his youthful, suntanned good looks were regularly commented on during his heyday in the 1920s. Later, in the light of what followed, they were recalled in sorrow, anger and disappointment. By the time the writer died in Hollywood...
Jamie on the burger van
There’s no one else to talk to so I might as well make the most of it. It’s a horrible thought but I can’t help thinking that his life is sort of like an animal’s, you know? Like he sort of doesn’t know he’s here and if he died tomorrow, he could still come down...
Here, there and everywhere
TAHMIMA ANAM’S LATEST novel The Startup Wife is a blisteringly funny satire about love, ambition, feminist geekdom and standing up for what you believe in. Deep-seated complexities of sexism and racism in Silicon Valley and beyond, and the frenzied uncontrollability of social media are laid bare as a charismatic husband gets all the credit for...
