Published in The Observer October 25, 2020
Kae Tempest has added one more string to an already crowded bow: On Connection is the first nonfiction work by this Mercury prize-winning musician, Ted Hughes award-winning poet, acclaimed playwright, novelist, and chief creative chronicler of the last decade. It’s also Tempest’s first publication since changing their name from Kate, and using they/them pronouns.
Continue reading “Review: On Connection, Kae Tempest”Published in BBC Culture September 14, 2020
What’s in a pen name? A whole heap of patriarchal oppression, if we’re to believe a recent publishing endeavour.
Continue reading “Why do women write under men’s names?”Published in The Observer September 7, 2020
It’s hard to overstate just how influential Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman was when published in 2011 – and how far we’ve come since. Nine years on and the feminism she had to advocate for has become thoroughly, totally mainstream, while perky books by clever journalists about every conceivable aspect of being a woman have proliferated in the ground Moran tilled.
Continue reading “Review: More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran”Published in The Observer August 2, 2020
Antkind is the debut novel of Charlie Kaufman, the Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York film-maker, and its premise is incredibly, well, Kaufmanesque.
Continue reading “Review: Antkind by Charlie Kaufman”Published in The Observer March 29, 2020
When #MeToo broke, it wasn’t just about high-profile cases of abuse – it felt like a new light being shone on all past interactions, allowing us to see them differently. Everywhere you saw women talking feverishly to each other, you knew it would be about this creepy boss, or that older guy.
Continue reading “Review: My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell”Published in The Observer March 22, 2020
Discomfort is putting it mildly. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, goes all the way to disturbing.
Continue reading “Review: The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld”If you’ve read so much as a sentence of Eimear McBride’s writing, it is likely to have burned into your brain. Her first two novels, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, were both written with a ferocious immediacy, in hurtling, viscerally direct prose that captures pre-verbal thought processes “far back in the mind”, as McBride put it.
Continue reading “Review: Strange Hotel, Eimear McBride”Published in The TLS November 22, 2019
IAN MCKELLEN The biography Garry O’Connor
BEHIND THE LENS My life David Suchet
Continue reading “Gandalf pays!”When published in Vigdis Hjorth’s native Norway in 2016, Will and Testament became both a bestseller and a literary scandal.
Continue reading “Review: Will and Testament, Vigdis Hjorth”You don’t need me to tell you that this is the “literary event of the year”. Thirty-four years after her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood has published a sequel. It’s already shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Bookshops are staying open to midnight on release day.
Continue reading “Review: The Testaments, Margaret Atwood”