I wrote a novel about the worst time in Sri Lanka’s history – but 2022 is a close rival
The Booker Prize-winning author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida on an age of political upheaval and bloodshed.
ByLiterature
Immerse yourself in the captivating world of literature with our collection of articles, offering literary analysis, book recommendations, author spotlights, and thought-provoking discussions that celebrate the written word.
How the greatest minds of the Enlightenment united in a small town in Germany
In 1790s Jena a group of thinkers including Friedrich Schiller and Goethe built the intellectual foundations of today’s world.
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The moral corruption of Holocaust fiction
John Boyne’s shameless sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas exemplifies a genre that expunges the genocide of its…
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How George Saunders became literature’s Mr Nice Guy
The author of Lincoln in the Bardo on US politics, his “limited talent”, and the curse of being seen as…
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Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends reveals the complexities of female relationships
The author’s portrait of two women growing up in 1980s Karachi exposes the contempt that can often lie beneath love.
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From the NS archive: But for the Grace of God
20 May 1977: Almost anybody afloat in a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s complete works has reason to regret the…
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Why DH Lawrence still gets under our skin
His vexatious, evolving style demonstrates a capacity to face the world as sensitively and honestly as possible.
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From the NS archive: The Cherry Orchard
24 July 1920: The beautiful, mad drama which I had staged often in the dim recesses of my mind was…
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Why Annie Ernaux deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature
With clinical precision and revelatory intimacy, the French memoirist reinvigorated the art of life-writing.
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Annie Ernaux and the brutal art of memoir
Ernaux understands that writing honestly about her parents is a form of betrayal – but she does it anyway.
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Hilary Mantel’s death is an incalculable loss to our national life and literature
The late novelist’s extraordinary talent was to take our collective history and make it new.
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The Philip Pullman affair shows social media is where good arguments go to die
The author of His Dark Materials has spoken out against “gesture politics” – but he too adds fuel to the…
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AN Wilson: the assembly-line intellectual
The writer’s exasperating new memoir offers a full dinner service of clichés and an insight into the glib fogeyism of…
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Thus Bad Begins confirms Javier Marías as a master of the novel form
Marías’ masterful expression of his characters’ psychological weather, combined with Margaret Jull Costa’s gifted translation, makes for rewarding reading.
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Philip Larkin at 100
Writers reflect on the poet’s life, work and legacy, a century after his birth.
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History at 30
How a bestselling debut novel about a group of murderous students became a cult classic.
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Writing in the age of Big Data
Alexander Kluge’s information epic and how the time for learning is running out.
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Ian McEwan’s long look back
The novelist on Liz Truss, Salman Rushdie, and why he finally decided to write his own story into his new…
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From spy to journalist to celebrated poet: the curious life of Basil Bunting
The letters of the Northumbrian modernist reveal an idiosyncratic career and an exacting critical mind.
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Reviewed in short: New books by Guy Standing, Stu Hennigan, Jessica Andrews and Don Paterson
The Blue Commons by Standing, Ghost Signs by Hennigan, Milk Teeth by Andrews and The Arctic by Paterson.
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