Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking , All My Puny Sorrows , Summer of My Amazing Luck , A Boy of Good Breeding , A Complicated Kindness , The Flying Troutmans , Irma Voth , Fight Night and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life . She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks...
Sep 05, 2025•28 min
Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of Wise Men , The Inseparables , Rooms for Vanishing and a story collection, The Book of Life . His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. On this episode of Little Atoms he talk...
Aug 22, 2025•29 min
Since Laura Lippman's debut, she has been recognised as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her "special, even extraordinary," and Gillian Flynn wrote, "She is simply a brilliant novelist." Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. On this episode of Little Atoms, Laura talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Murder Takes a Vacat...
Aug 14, 2025•28 min
Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London. On this episode of Little Atoms, he talks to Neil Denny about Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World, his first book for which he was the recipient of the 2023 RSL Giles St Aubyn Award, awarded for debut works of non-fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Aug 08, 2025•27 min
Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She was educated in the US and now lives in London. Her first novel Golden Child won multiple prizes and was named one of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World’. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her Booker Prize long listed new novel Love Forms . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Aug 01, 2025•27 min
Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. His previous books o n the history of drugs include High Society, Mescaline and Psychonauts. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jul 24, 2025•30 min
Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and former editor of Medical Humanities , a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American , Wired , CrimeReads , and Undark . She has previously appeared on Little Atoms talking about her books Death’s Summer Coat and Mr. Humble & Dr Butcher , and on this episode she talks to Neil Denny about her latest book The Intermediaries: A Weimar S...
Jul 22, 2025•38 min
Wendy Erskine is the author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move . She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers' Choice Award. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it . A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works a...
Jul 18, 2025•33 min
David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David's first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils , looked at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future. It was published in March 2020 with both The Times and The Telegraph naming it a book of the year. Its fans include Robert Macfarlane and Margaret Atwood, and it has been translated into nine other languages. He has had pieces p...
Jul 11, 2025•29 min
Marie Rutkoski is a New York Times bestselling author of several novels for children and young adults. She grew up in Illinois as the oldest of four children, and has lived in Moscow, Prague, and Paris. She holds degrees from the University of Iowa and Harvard University, and is now a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College, where she teaches Shakespeare, children's literature, and fiction writing. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel for an a...
Jul 04, 2025•30 min
Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his debut novel Saraswati. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 26, 2025•28 min
Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. Her debut novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life was longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Award. She is also the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me , which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Her writing is published in The New Yorker , the New York Times , Vogue , The Paris Review , New York Review of Books , Guardian , Granta and elsewhere. Nell is an Associate Professor of Crea...
Jun 19, 2025•30 min
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and the nonfiction books The Sting and Always Crashing in the Same Car . His writing has appeared in the New York Times , the Paris Review , The Believer , Tin House , Vogue , GQ , Black Clock , and Open City . He has been a MacDowell Fellow and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books . He resides in Los Angeles. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest bo...
Jun 12, 2025•29 min
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars , which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books , London Review of Books , Granta and other places. On this episode of...
Jun 05, 2025•29 min
Daria Lavelle writes fiction, most of which features at least one impossible thing. Her stories have appeared in Dark Matter , The Deadlands and Dread Machine , among others. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and enjoys opera, escape rooms, and checking restaurants off her bucket list. She was born in Kyiv before immigrating to the US as a child. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel Aftertaste . Hosted on Aca...
May 29, 2025•29 min
Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning poet and author of Boy Friends , which was a Sunday Times Critics Choice and shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish National Book Awards. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and is the current Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, and Edinburgh's Makar. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his first novel Muckle Flugga . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 23, 2025•30 min
Cate Baum was born in Cambridge to a magician and a big band singer. She grew up in the East Anglian countryside, spending summers roaming the wilds of the UK. She studied screenwriting at UCLA and gained a master’s with Distinction in Creative Writing from City, University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel Land of Hope . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 15, 2025•28 min
Eley Williams' collection of short stories Attrib. & Other Stories won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her writing appears in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Liberating the Canon, the TLS and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of the novel The Liar’s Dictionary and on this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest story collection Modera...
May 08, 2025•28 min
Simon Park is Associate Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is an expert in the literature and material culture of the early modern world, particularly from Portugal and its vast global empire. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new book Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 01, 2025•28 min
Danielle Giles is a writer and researcher based in Bristol. She has been published (writing as Danielle Vrublevskis) in Extra Teeth and Dear Damsels, shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. She won the Local Prize in the 2023 Bath Short Story Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel Mere . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more in...
Apr 24, 2025•27 min
Megan Hunter is a prizewinning novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Her first novel, The End We Start From was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Books Are My Bag Awards, longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Awards finalist and won the Forward Reviews Editor’s Choice Award. It was adapted into a major motion picture by Alice Birch, starring Jodie Comer and directed by Mahalia Belo. Her second novel, The Harpy , was Indie Book of the Month; she is currently...
Apr 17, 2025•33 min
Ron Currie is the award-winning author of five novels. He has won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, the Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. As a screenwriter he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations and has developed projects with AMC Studios, Amblin Television, and ITV America. He li...
Apr 10, 2025•26 min
Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone , shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers , shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China . Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East , won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. He...
Apr 03, 2025•28 min
Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood), and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews, Climbing Days, and Outpost. Only After Dark, a BBC Radio 4 series about the nocturnal world, was broadcast to acclaim in 2022. Dan has written for the Guardian, Economist, Esquire and Monocle. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...
Mar 28, 2025•31 min
Dani Heywood-Lonsdale has paternal roots on the tiny island of Molokai, Hawaii - referred to as the Sandwich Islands throughout her debut novel The Portrait Artist - and maternal roots in the Philippines. She is a Faber Academy alumna and teaches English Literature in Oxfordshire. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mar 21, 2025•29 min
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure , Pilgrims Way , Dottie , Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence , By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift , Gravel Heart , and Afterlives , which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2...
Mar 14, 2025•26 min
Sarah Hesketh is a writer and editor from Pendle, in East Lancashire. She is the author of the poetry collections Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf and The Hard Word Box , and the editor of The Emma Press Anthology of Age . She currently lives in London and works as Managing Editor for Modern Poetry in Translation . On this week’s episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest book 2016 . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 07, 2025•32 min
Stephen May is the author of seven novels including Life! Death! Prizes! which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and is a winner of the Media Wales Reader’s Prize. He has also written plays, as well as for television and film. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Green Ink . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Feb 28, 2025•30 min
Susan Barker is the author of four books. Her third novel, The Incarnations, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews' Top Ten Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Old Soul . An excerpt from Old Soul won a Northern Writers' Award for Fiction in 2020, as well as funding from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. Susan currently lives in Manche...
Feb 21, 2025•28 min
Rachel Bower is an award-winning poet and short story writer from Bradford. She is the author of two poetry collections and a non-fiction book on literary letters. Her poems and stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including The London Magazine, The White Review, Magma and Stand. Bower won The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2019/20 and the W&A Short Story Competition 2020. She has also been listed for the White Review Short Story Prize 2019, the RSL V.S. Pritchett Sho...
Feb 14, 2025•28 min
