Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

In Small Earthquakes journalist and travel writer Shafik Meghji traverses landscapes from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego and Easter Island to South Georgia to reveal the overlooked yet profound – and profoundly enduring – connections between Britain and Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

Kazakh, Tatar, Russian, Uyghur, Polish, German, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Chechen, Korean, Armenian – this far from exhaustive list gives an inkling of the ethnic complexity created by Kazakhstan’s history of pastoral nomadism, Russian imperial conquest and colonization, followed by famine, forced sedentarization, mass deportations and Gulag incarceration.

In 1983, along with thousands of other women, I cut down sections of the fence around RAF Greenham Common, which was to house nuclear weapons in the form of cruise missiles.

Horace lived in turbulent times. He was born in 65 BC and died in 8 BC, a period that saw Rome’s frightening transition from republic to empire. As Peter Stothard makes clear in this wonderful biography of the poet, this was a time of assassinations, suicides, civil war and confiscations.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts.

We all have our own unique ways of expressing ourselves through fashion, even if we don’t realise we do. Whether we dress to stand out, dress to fit in, or simply put clothes on our body just so we aren’t naked, the way we present ourselves to the world is a conscious act that says something about who we are.

The summer of 1985 marked Denise Herzing’s first time swimming with wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis), in the “gin-clear” waters of the Bahamas. Planning to study their behaviour during a six-week trip, the marine biologist realized within just a few days that she would need to spend decades with these long-lived animals to fully document how they communicate with one another.

Within a month of its publication in North America in February 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned in Concord, Massachusetts, where it was dismissed by local authorities as “trash and suitable only for the slums”. Set in the antebellum South, Mark Twain’s most famous novel centres on two fugitives: Huck, a white teenager escaping an abusive father, and Jim, an enslaved Black man seeking freedom.