Last year I spent a month at Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat near Edinburgh. Fellows (as the participants are called) come from all round the world, half a dozen at a
It’s not often that you pick up a book that grabs you from the very first page, holds you in its thrall to the last, and leaves you with haunting images of the extremes of human
Often, without much thought (and quite insensitively), we consider other cultures to be intrinsically different from our own; we imagine our communities as divided from each other
A drawing pinned to the wall of 11-year-old Leila’s attic bedroom shows a tiny dark spot in the midst of a vast expanse of blue. The blue is the Mediterranean; the dark spot, the
Pascal Quignard is one of my favourite authors. But whenever I can get hold of a new book by him, I do not jump into it immediately – I put it away on a special shelf, to be savo
Poet Ana Blandiana is of that rare breed that has been laurelled with both literary and humanitarian singularity. Her career began with a poetry so charged with honesty that in the
There are three narratives in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Like a Falling Shadow: an account of James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King Jnr., as he escapes to Lisbon in 196
In her native Germany, evening-class teacher Brigitte Glaser lived a quiet life, writing regional crime and culinary-themed fiction in her spare time – until, in 2016, her Black
