News and reviews

Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter Prize 2025 feature in the Guardian

Added on 09/07/2025

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”.

Small Earthquakes featured in BBC Travel’s ‘Six Upcoming Summer Travel Books’

Added on 04/07/2025

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.

What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani? reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/07/2025

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.

Lynne Jones writes in the Guardian

Added on 02/07/2025

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 reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 02/07/2025

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 reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/07/2025

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.

Family Romance reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/07/2025

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.

Unsuitable featured in Cosmopolitan

Added on 30/06/2025

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.

Is Anyone Listening? reviewed in Nature

Added on 30/06/2025

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.

Jim reviewed in the TLS

Added on 27/06/2025

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.

Tattoos reviewed in the TLS

Added on 27/06/2025

Writing in these pages last year, Ian Sansom observed tartly that “tattoos became largely unremarkable sometime between Mattel’s introduction of the Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie (Doll N4758) in 2009 and the arrival of Samantha Cameron’s ankle tattoo in Downing Street in 2010” (TLS, August 16, 2024).

Beastly Britain reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 27/06/2025

When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport.