strand

Image courtesy of British Library Images Swayed by the motion of the Circle Line, I grip the overhead rail with one hand, an Oxford Classics paperback in the other. The modernist fragmentations of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf become increasingly oblique as I read (without a hint of performativity), making me wish I had a hand free to scratch my head. My attention starts to wane. Opposite, a fellow commuter smiles warmly into a screen. A message from someone close, perhaps;

Image courtesy of Iñaki del Olmo for Unsplash I know I’m a little late to the game for 2026 reading suggestions, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling a post-Goodreads challenge burnout in February, especially amidst the assessment period cram. Anyhow, I was inspired by this burnout to help curate Goodreads to-be-read-piles this year to fight the post-challenge blues.  The ‘new literary canon’ would seem like contradictory wording when the modern literary world has been so inte

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons The first night of the London Literature Festival is opened by Sayaka Murata, interviewed by Octavia Bright. Sayaka Murata is a new-generation Japanese writer, celebrating the translation of her speculative fiction novel ‘Vanishing World’ into English. She has sold over two million copies of her books in over forty countries; famous for challenging family, romance and societal conventions in her blunt, defiant writing.  Her book ‘Vanishing

Gorgeous and raw, The Use of Photography , by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, and the once obscure photographer Marc Marie, chronicles their shared, “unknown laws” of lovemaking through a combination of photography and short prose accompaniments. While the memoir’s premise of two lovers told around fourteen, black-and-white, post-coital pictures, really carries the potential for a contrived, noir atmosphere, these still lives are anything but ornamental. Not only are these p

The state of not knowing is one of eternal limbo. To be born into a world beyond human understanding, caught delicately between a...

“ We love words .” When preparing for my interview with Ted Hodgkinson, head of literature and spoken word at the Southbank Centre, I...

The sound of Ahmed Adnan’s oud warmed the brutalist walls of the Barbican’s Cinema 1 as Comma Press presented Voices of Resilience....

Released in 1987, like a caged bird freed from the silencing of Americas Post-Colonial slave trade, Toni Morrison’s third novel ‘Beloved’...

I have just read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential for the first time and it’s like nothing I have read before. Perhaps a similar spirit of adventure and endurance can be found on the pages of a classical winding western novel. Perhaps it emulates the intensity and grit of a gangster movie. Maybe even the relentless aggression that runs throughout is reminiscent of a heavy metal rock song. But I think the closest comparison would be the Dangerous Book For Boys , but fo

Last week, the King’s World Literature Society kicked off their first book club of the year with an introduction to The Little Prince ,...