Celebrated author and illustrator’s work inspired by Polish childhood and experience as wartime refugee
Jan Pieńkowski, the beloved illustrator and author of more than 140 children’s books, has died aged 85.
Pieńkowski, whose work included the Meg and Mog pop-up books, had been living with Alzheimer’s.
Continue reading...The author’s hand-picked panel share their ideas on music, mushrooms, zombies and more
What do you get when you bring together some of the most revered thinkers, most progressive-minded activists and one of the most celebrated novelists writing today to discuss the immense challenges we face? A debate about the Spice Girls, of course! For the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, Margaret Atwood wanted to gather some of her favourite experts from around the globe, to ask how they see the world we live in – and what they believe is key to creating the future they want to see.
The lineup included bestselling author Raj Patel, dubbed the “rock star of social justice writing”; Senator Yvonne Boyer, the first Indigenous person appointed to the Canadian senate from Ontario; Akala, a writer, musician and poet; the excellently named Merlin Sheldrake, an expert on fungi; Kate Fletcher, whose speciality is sustainable fashion; Jessie Housty, a young Indigenous activist with a focus on decolonisation and community; and Yasmeen Hassan of Equality Now, which works to combat gender discrimination. The panel, hand-picked by Atwood, reflects the many disparate subjects the author is passionate about, and she was as keen to hear from them as they were to understand her vision and ideas.
Continue reading...At 82, the Canadian author has seen it all - and her novels predicted most of it. Just don’t presume you know what she thinks, she tells Hadley Freeman
‘How are you? You’re named after Ernest Hemingway’s first wife,” Margaret Atwood announces by way of a greeting when we meet on a hotel’s heated patio near her home in Toronto. Atwood, 82, has often been described as a prophet, thanks to her uncanny ability to foresee the future in her books. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, it looked, terrifyingly, like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale, when the government is overthrown and the dystopian land of Gilead is founded. She seemingly predicted the 2008 financial crash in her nonfiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published that year. Atwood has always scoffed at any suggestion of telepathy, pointing out that every atrocity in The Handmaid’s Tale had been carried out by totalitarian regimes in real life, and she “predicted” the crash by noticing the number of adverts offering to help people with their personal debt. But as she stands in front of me, snowflakes glittering around her like stars, the flames of the hotel’s gas heaters leaping on either side of her, dressed all in black save for her little red hat, correctly guessing who I’m named after, she certainly seems to have a touch of magic about her. How did she know about the Hemingway connection?
“Because I’m deep into Martha Gellhorn,” she says, launching into a long discussion about the celebrated war correspondent and Hemingway’s third wife. Atwood isn’t writing a book about Gellhorn (yet), but she found a letter from her to the father of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, and is now a Gellhornologist. After six or so minutes, I wonder if we’ll ever talk about anything else, but Atwood has a regal quality that makes interruption unthinkable. It does not, as I later learn, render argument impossible.
I don’t like to favouritise my books. The others would be out to get you: ‘How could you? I spent all this time with you!’
Continue reading...On the 65th anniversary of Funny Face, we run down the Givenchy girl’s best moments – from upstaging her (usually much older) leading men to literally representing heaven in a dazzling white cable-knit
This exotic MGM romance directed by Hepburn’s then husband, Mel Ferrer, was in fact her first big flop. Anthony Perkins plays a Venezuelan refugee whose life is saved by Rima the jungle girl: Hepburn in a suede pixie tunic, accessorised with a pet fawn and backed by a supporting cast in brownface.
Continue reading...Semi-true story from Julian Fellowes sets churchgoing Kansas lady the challenge of keeping the girl about to become Louise Brooks in line in 1920s New York
Written by Julian Fellowes, who brought us Downton Abbey and recent series The Gilded Age, and directed by Michael Engler, who worked on both the aforementioned, this based-extremely-loosely-on-fact costume drama adapted from a novel by Laura Moriarty should hit the sweet spot for fans of Fellowes’ particular variety of saucy-soapy period pieces. Like so much of Fellowes’ work, it effectively flatters the viewer by assuming he or she must be familiar with certain historical figures (in this case, early cinema star Louise Brooks) and then appears to dish the dirt on them through the eyes of a character from another class or at least different social sphere.
Here, that parallax view is from the perspective of Norma – played by Lady Grantham herself, Elizabeth McGovern, taking a lead role for a change. When first met in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, Norma seems like a nice, churchgoing lady of a certain age, respectably married to a lawyer (Campbell Scott) and mother of two practically grownup sons. When she hears that local pianist Myra Brooks (Victoria Hill) is in search of a chaperone to accompany her precocious but exceedingly talented teenage daughter Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) to New York to attend a prestigious dance school, Norma mysteriously jumps at the chance. Turns out she has a good reason: she was actually raised in an orphanage there for a short while before being adopted by kindly midwestern farmers, and now wants to find her birth parents.
Continue reading...The novelist Niamh Campbell on why describing intimacy is so difficult and how creative writing about sexuality is changing. Plus, she picks 10 of her favourite examples
One of my favourite literary sex scenes is a swift and quiet one. In Colm Tóibín’s The Pearl Fishers, a gay man having dinner with a former lover and this lover’s – fanatically Catholic – wife thinks, with a flash of candidness, of anilingus past. It doesn’t read like a calculated shock, just pleasure; the story moves on and the image melts out. No point is made, nobody humiliated, no corny gotcha! occurs. There are only three people: one deceiving (husband), one pious (wife) and one emboldened but alone. The point is nuanced humanity. It’s hot.
It has been remarked upon that recent writing about sex by, in the main, young women tends towards the squalid, abject and confrontational. I can tell you that this partly down to the fact that app-based erotic culture in the metropolises of late capitalism really can be squalid, abject and confrontational. If people’s lives become miserable mills of boredom and humiliation they will tend to take it out on one another. I know this because I am Irish. People think this country was deranged for most of the 20th century by the church, but it was also deranged by poverty and, relatedly, shame. #NotallIrish of course; some people belonged to a more sex-positive cosmopolitan elite class, some were able to smuggle in condoms. And yet, the fact that it still feels impossible to discuss sex and Ireland without mentioning penitentiary laundries says a lot.
Continue reading...Our beliefs about difficult feelings may do more damage than the feelings themselves
In the late 19th-century America, a somewhat bizarre form of abstinence emerged. The vice was not alcohol but anxiety. Citizens of New York began to attend regular “Don’t Worry Clubs” in which they encouraged each other to look on the bright side of life. Their founder, Theodore Seward, argued that Americans were “slaves to the worrying habit”, which was the “enemy which destroys happiness”. It needed to be “attacked” with “resolute and persevering effort”.
By the early 20th century, the psychologist William James described how people had developed a kind of “religion of healthy-mindedness” with the aim of turning the mind away from all negative thoughts and feelings.
Continue reading...Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring was born from a desire to preserve online expressions of outrage, grief and dissent, say editors
The first literary work to emerge from Myanmar since the military seized control of the country a year ago reveals the altruism and courage of a new generation of writers, its editor has said.
Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring is an anthology of poems and essays, many of which were written during the military crackdown after last February’s coup. Others date from 1988 to 2020.
Continue reading...A few years ago, I had a fan. She had read my writing and listened to my podcast, and often replied warmly to my tweets. Occasionally, she would send me private messages, and eventually I started following her back. It was nice. At some point, the volume of communication increased – I began receiving emails, and the notifications and messages spread to Instagram. Then they grew more frequent, uncomfortably so. She wanted things from me: to work for me, to meet up with me, to know how my weekend had gone, to tell me how hers had gone, to tell me about the job she disliked, for me to help her with a project she was launching.
My heart began to sink whenever I saw her name appear on my phone and I started responding less and less in the hope of discouraging her overtures. Then she came to an event I’d organised – the first time we’d actually met – and to my mortification, presented me with a bundle of gifts (which I obviously sent a thank you message for – I’m not a monster).
Continue reading...Former model Jack Guinness caught up in furore over Mississippi mayor’s attempt to withhold funding for library until ‘homosexual materials’ are withdrawn
A British writer, presenter and former model says he is shocked to find himself at the centre of an unprecedented wave of book banning in the US.
A Mississippi mayor has told the Madison County Library to remove LGBTQ+ books from its shelves or lose funding. One of the books singled out as an example was The Queer Bible, a collection of LGBTQ+ history essays edited by Jack Guinness. Ridgeland’s Republican mayor, Gene McGee, has refused to release funds to the library until “homosexual materials” are withdrawn.
Continue reading...The clinical psychologist has 3 million followers for her self-help TikToks and now her book is a bestseller. She talks about social media, the pandemic and the simple tools that really help
Dr Julie Smith, 37, is a clinical psychologist who has a private practice in Hampshire and has spent 10 years working for the NHS. In November 2019, she started making TikToks containing clear, engaging advice about various mental health issues. She has more than 3 million followers and in January published her first book, Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?, which has spent four weeks at the top of bestseller lists.
There are a lot of self-help books published; why do you think yours has struck a chord?
I think people like the fact that it’s evidence-based. I’m a clinical psychologist, so the things I’ve put in there have been scrutinised with the latest research and they are things that are taught to people in therapy, depending on what they’re going to therapy for. They are also life skills that we can all use.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is the latest title to appear in a cheap modern version after copyright expires
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is one of the most memorable literary payoffs in history, the end of F Scott Fitzgerald’s defining novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby.
Yet this famous ending will be lost to many readers thanks to the proliferation of substandard editions, one of which loses the last three pages and instead finishes tantalisingly halfway through a paragraph.
Continue reading...More than 100 authors from around the world have written to the Rwandan president about the case of Innocent Bahati, who disappeared a year ago today
Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri and JM Coetzee have joined more than 100 writers from around the world in calling on the Rwandan president to intervene in the case of the poet Innocent Bahati, who disappeared one year ago today.
According to human rights organisation PEN International, Bahati was last seen at a hotel in Nyanza district, in the Southern Province of Rwanda, on 7 February 2021. The poet, who is well-known in Rwanda and had published poetry on YouTube and Facebook, as well as regularly performing at live events, failed to return to Kigali, and his phones have been switched off since.
Continue reading...Branagh’s spirited performance as Poirot and a big-name ensemble cast can’t keep this stale and two-dimensional whodunnit afloat
Long coronavirally delayed, Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie movie puffs effortfully into harbour. It’s the classic whodunnit about a murder on a steamer making its way down the river in Egypt with an Anglo-American boatful of waxy-faced cameos aboard. The horrible homicide means that one of the passengers will have to spring into action, and this is of course the amply moustached Hercule Poirot, played by Branagh himself. It is Poirot who interviews suspects, supervises corpse-storage in the ship’s galley freezer cabinet and delivers the final unmasking – and all without the captain insisting that the Egyptian police should possibly get involved.
Screenwriter Michael Green has adapted the 1937 novel with some new inventions: some people of colour are introduced, and Christie’s intense dislike for her wealthy-hypocrite leftwing character has been dialled down. Most startlingly, Green invents a very good prelude showing the young Poirot’s service in the trenches of the first world war, and the origin of that moustache. Nothing in the rest of this rather stale and two-dimensional tale matches the brio of that opening.
Continue reading...Conservatives are pushing to ban books from school libraries. At a time of crisis, a group of Pennsylvania teenagers are fighting back
“Napoleon’s use of the sheep was notable,” says Jordan Daughtry, 14. She’s clutching a copy of Animal Farm, and referring to the authoritarian Berkshire boar who seizes control of an English acreage, before bending his fellow animals to his will.
The sheep, who represent the unwitting masses in George Orwell’s critique of Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule, are “ignorant buffoons”, Daughtry says.
Kiara Daughtry, left, and Lena Cackley.
Continue reading...The writer’s archaic shorthand has baffled experts for over a century. So they launched a deciphering competition for fans – with stunning results that cast new light on his love life and financial peril
Despite all the precision he brought to bear on his intricate plots, Charles Dickens was a notoriously messy writer. His manuscripts are full of inky splodges, with barely legible alterations crammed in between scrawled, sloping lines. Worse still was his love of a type of shorthand dating from the 1700s. To this, he added his own chaotic modifications to create what he called “the devil’s handwriting”.
Fond of puzzles and codes, the great Victorian writer used these time-saving hieroglyphics to make notes and copies of his letters and documents, reams of which he burned. Academics are still toiling to decipher 10 shorthand manuscripts that survived. Forget Wordle. This is the Dickens Code. And for a long time, it had seemed uncrackable.
Continue reading...For seven years, the East German security service’s poetry group met in Berlin to discuss literature. But there was more to it than just learning about iambic pentameter
At the height of the tense second phase of the cold war, a group of Stasi majors, propaganda officers and border guards convened at a heavily fortified compound in socialist east Berlin. From spring 1982 until winter 1989, they gathered once every four weeks, from 4pm until 6pm, at the House of Culture inside the premises of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment (the Stasi’s paramilitary wing), in Berlin’s Adlershof district. They met in a first-floor room adorned with portraits of East German leader Erich Honecker and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that was closed with a security seal overnight.
But the Stasi men did not gather to gameplan nuclear war scenarios, work up disinformation campaigns or fine-tune infiltration techniques. They set out to learn about iambic pentameter, cross-rhyming schemes and Petrarchan sonnets. The group, which internal memos referred to as the Working Circle of Writing Chekists (a reference to the fearsome Bolshevist secret police, the Cheka), produced two anthologies over this seven-year period. I got hold of a copy of one shortly before I moved to Berlin in 2016. The slim paperback, its title Wir Über Uns (“We about us”) falling down the front page in curling calligraphic letters, felt like something out of a Monty Python sketch, or a spin-off from the film The Lives of Others. How had a secret police synonymous with the suppression of free thought ended up writing poetry? Over the coming months I tried to track down former members of the circles, and contacted them to see if they could tell me more.
Continue reading...At first, I could hardly get through a novel. But slowly reading – and writing – saved me from a life of drugs, rehab and jail
When I was in tenth grade in Tampa, Florida, I was, like millions of other high school students, assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye for English class. Like millions of other high school students, I was extremely fragile. I was holding on by a thread. I was 15 and spent much of my time at school, on the days I would go, doing OxyContin, Xanax, cocaine and speed in the bathroom. I jittered and itched through class, and my internal life was, to say the least, stifled. It would continue to be stifled for the next few years, until it became so claustrophobic that I attempted suicide. Needless to say, I was pretty hit or miss with school assignments. But I had always liked to read. I decided to crack Salinger’s book and read a chapter or two. I stayed up all night and finished it. I came into class the next day wired, eyes wide: it felt as if I had been hooked up to a car battery. I remember walking into the classroom and saying to my English teacher, “What the hell was that?”
I didn’t know anything about the book. I didn’t know that the men who shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were both obsessed with it. I didn’t know that it was the subject of endless think pieces debating the ethical ramifications of Holden Caulfield’s character. I didn’t know Salinger stormed the beaches on D-Day, carried scars from his years in war. I just got sucked in. It is a funny, polarising little book. I remember my girlfriend at the time saying she hated it, that she couldn’t get through it. But my teacher told me that every year at least one person does what I did, gets hooked up to the car battery. Looking back, it makes sense that someone in my particular situation would have this reaction to it. In fact, it is almost embarrassing just how cliched it is. But that’s what happened. And, in what would become a theme of my life, what stuck with me more than any of the particular content of the book was the feeling of being sucked in, of losing time trapped in someone else’s words and turbulent emotions.
Continue reading...As her beloved character Rachel returns, older and sober, the Irish author discusses her own journey from addiction to recovery - and the sexist snobbery that surrounds her work
Marian Keyes is in bed. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, but she has just got back from a funeral and was feeling chilly. “It was a beautiful send off,” she says in her southern Irish lilt, as reassurance that she’s OK to talk. She is wearing a lilac hoodie and flashes a pastel pink manicure (a Keyes heroine would know the shade) as she rearranges the pillows to get comfy. Within a few minutes it feels as if we are both having tea and biscuits under the duvet at her Dún Laoghaire home outside Dublin, as she gives me a virtual tour of her bedroom.
So far, so Marian Keyes. Loved by readers for her chatty style and satisfying storylines, she was for many years dubbed the queen of chick lit, a phrase now as passé as Daniel Cleaver’s chat-up lines in Bridget Jones’s Diary. In fact, her novels have tackled hefty issues such as addiction (Rachel’s Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There), domestic violence (This Charming Man) and depression (The Mystery of Mercy Close), always with her trademark lightness of touch. Yet despite selling more than 35m copies over the years, she is too often dismissed as a popular writer of books with pink covers (both of which are fine by her, thanks for asking).
In new book, David Friedman recounts private meeting with Israeli president in which Trump also knocked Netanyahu – and how he says he turned his man around
Meeting then-Israeli president Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem in May 2017, Donald Trump stunned advisers by criticising the then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for being unwilling to seek peace while Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, was “desperate” for a deal.
The comment “knocked everyone off their chairs”, David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, writes in a new book.
Continue reading...