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....
Mar 23, 2021•30 min
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....
Mar 19, 2021•31 min
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....
Mar 16, 2021•30 min
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....
Mar 09, 2021•32 min
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....
Mar 05, 2021•29 min
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.
Mar 02, 2021•40 min
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....
Feb 26, 2021•28 min
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 info...
Feb 23, 2021•29 min
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 inf...
Feb 16, 2021•42 min
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....
Feb 09, 2021•38 min
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 informat...
Feb 02, 2021•28 min
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.
Jan 29, 2021•25 min
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 ...
Jan 26, 2021•30 min
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...
Jan 18, 2021•33 min
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.
Jan 12, 2021•31 min
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.
Dec 24, 2020•26 min
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. Host...
Dec 08, 2020•30 min
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 ...
Dec 01, 2020•31 min
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 &nbs...
Nov 24, 2020•29 min
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 Tri o. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Nov 17, 2020•29 min
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 ...
Nov 10, 2020•54 min
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 i...
Oct 31, 2020•26 min
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....
Oct 27, 2020•31 min
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 Grassroo...
Oct 19, 2020•33 min
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 th...
Oct 12, 2020•28 min
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, sh...
Oct 05, 2020•27 min
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/...
Sep 28, 2020•29 min
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....
Sep 21, 2020•28 min
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 Runawa...
Sep 17, 2020•20 min
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....
Sep 14, 2020•27 min