fiction
theartsdesk Q&A: Author Michael DibdinSunday, 02 January 2011
“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime... Read more... |
Any Human Heart, Channel 4Monday, 22 November 2010
Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with... Read more... |
South Asian Literature 1: Romesh Gunesekera Q&ASaturday, 16 October 2010
The inaugural South Asian Literature Festival takes place in London over 10 days. It has drawn authors such as Amit Chaudhuri, Fatima Bhutto, Kenan Malik and Mohamed Hanif, as well as publishers, translators and artists (performance and graphic)... Read more... |
South Asian Literature 2: Rana Dasgupta micro-storySaturday, 16 October 2010
Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist living in Delhi. His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a 13-part story cycle in the tradition of Chaucer and Boccaccio, was translated into eight languages and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Opera NorthMonday, 11 October 2010
To paraphrase a cliché, it’s rare to leave a theatre humming the lighting. But here, Matthew Haskins’ lighting designs help make this production so powerful and evocative, whether projecting grotesque, distorted shadows on the back wall of Madeleine... Read more... |
Birdsong, Comedy TheatreWednesday, 29 September 2010
Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong has reached phenomenon status: number 13 on a recent BBC Big Read competition, part of the school curriculum along with World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, three million copies sold worldwide. Its... Read more... |
On Adapting Birdsong for the StageThursday, 23 September 2010
I remember walking into the Hawthorn Ridge cemetery, seeing a grave of a 20-year-old boy who died on 1 July, 1916, and knowing for the first time why Sebastian Faulks needed to write Birdsong, and why I desperately wanted it to live and breathe and... Read more... |
What I'm Reading: Broadcaster Mavis NicholsonTuesday, 21 September 2010
They say women past a certain age can’t get work in broadcasting. In more enlightened times, Mavis Nicholson was the first woman to interview on daytime television. She had given up a career in advertising, married, and had children by the time she... Read more... |
The Man Booker Prize 2010 shortlist announcedTuesday, 07 September 2010
Could Peter Carey possibly become the first author to win the Booker three times? Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) both previously won him the most prestigious and hotly contended literary gong this side of the... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Writer Patrick MarberTuesday, 31 August 2010
Next up in our summer reading series is dramatist Patrick Marber whose shrewd, sometimes excoriating, but always riveting observations of the human condition in plays such as Closer always manage to pull off that rare trick of appealing to critics... Read more... |
The Leopard: The Original Film for FoodiesSaturday, 28 August 2010
The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il... Read more... |
In Their Own Words: British Novelists, BBC FourMonday, 16 August 2010
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world... Read more... |
