Acclaimed novelist reveals she became almost silent as a child due to stress
Novelist Deborah Levy first discovered writing as a kind of therapy when her voice disappeared as a child, she has revealed.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the popular British writer, acclaimed for her Booker Prize-shortlisted novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk, said her voice gradually got quieter during her schooldays in South Africa.
Continue reading...The renowned author on the unfinished task of replacing the patriarchy, swapping 24,000 letters with her mother, and why she gives all her books away
Isabel Allende’s books have been translated into more than 42 languages and sold some 75m copies globally. Her career spans fiction and nonfiction, and she’s also created the Isabel Allende Foundation in memory of her daughter (who died in 1992), working to empower women and girls around the world. Her new novel, Violeta, spans 100 years and recounts the turbulent life and times of its South American heroine. Allende, 79, who was born in Peru and raised in Chile, spoke from the study of her home in California, where she writes daily.
How did Violeta begin?
The idea started when my mother died, right before the current pandemic hit. She was born in 1920 when the influenza pandemic reached Latin America, so it was almost natural to have the two bookends of the novel be pandemics. When I write, I don’t have a plan and I don’t have a message – I just want people to come with me, to let me tell them a story.
It was a regular family home – just one in which I learned not to run around the garden when the funeral processions passed, and to jump over, never on, any bluish grey powder I might find
When I was eight, roller skates were things you stepped into while wearing your outdoor shoes. They had laced, red leather toe-pieces that you pushed your shoes into, and red straps to buckle round your ankles. Two chunky black wheels sat either side of your toes, and two either side of your ankles. The metal base could be shortened or lengthened as needed. The skates made a loud clacking noise and didn’t roll well on -carpets or bumpy -pavements. If my sister and I were to build up any momentum at all, there was only one place to go. Down the crem.
The crematory was cavernous. The clackclackroll of skates was loud on the tiled floor, which was cold and hard to fall on, but goodness, you could pick up some speed. On the other side of the immense wall was the chapel. We knew that during the day coffins came through one hatch and were rolled across to three steel ones on the opposite side: cremators 1, 2 and 3. But we only went down the crem – as we all called it – when the room was still and the furnaces empty and cold. Each cremator had a small, nautical-style wheel that, when spun, opened the doors on to the scorched bricks of the incinerators. These wheels were handy to grab hold of when we needed to slow down. Occasionally, we’d spin one to see inside. My sister climbed in once, and her trousers were never the same again.
Continue reading...In an age of catastrophe, humour is more important than ever, argues the satirical author.
• Plus, 10 terrific 21st-century comic novels
I do not write historical fiction. But I envy those who do. I can picture them sitting in the lamp-lit halls of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, thumbing through fraying, early 20th‑century telephone directories or spinning the roulette of the microfiche machine, or meeting at a nearby coffee dispensary with fellow history-minded wordsmiths in the wee hours of the day, like hunters getting ready to put a bullet through the heart of a wildebeest. The best are able to address the current moment through deft metaphysical journeys between the present and the past, to illuminate our wayward realities by reminding us that it has ever been so, that the past is not even the past, or whatever Faulkner said.
Personally, I have trouble building a literary time machine. A decade ago, when I wrote a memoir set primarily in the 1980s, all I could remember of that era was Michael J Fox running around in a varsity jacket. The rest of my memories were just volumes of mist that sometimes trickled out of my minor brain holes, tantalising but highly suspect emissions that bore news of events which may or may not have been. When one’s teenage years are a distant Greek island, imagine trying to write a novel about the romantic entanglements of the Italian futurists or the political cataclysms of Meiji-era Japan, or anything at all about the ancient Egyptians.
Continue reading...My self-esteem was at rock bottom, but on a break from my academic job I found myself in Paris. As I wandered through the city, an impulse buy gave me hope I could value myself again
A couple of years ago, after a bad academic year, I’d thought things would get better over the summer. They didn’t. I kept walking out of shops without buying what I’d gone in for, because it felt wrong to be taking up space and expecting attention. I couldn’t buy train tickets, even at the machine, because other people deserved to go first and, as soon as there was someone behind me, I gave up mid-transaction. I wasn’t eating much – food was for other people – but at the same time I was travelling and appearing at literary events and festivals, confident on stage as I’d been confident in the classroom all year. It seemed to me that my low estimation of myself off stage was correct and so I didn’t think to seek help any more than I’d seek help for believing that rain is wet.
One day in September (kids at school, students still on summer vacation, a time when work can be done from a train or hotel), I was in Paris, changing trains, really, but still with enough sense to know that a person arriving at night and leaving the next day might as well leave late the next day and give herself a day in Paris. I wasn’t sure it would work, knew myself perfectly capable of walking the streets hour after hour telling myself that any competent person would be enjoying museums and shops and cafes and what kind of privileged neurotic steals a day from her work and her family and then doesn’t even have the guts to buy a croissant, days off are wasted on me and I don’t deserve … I knew the city, a bit, from teenaged (mis)adventures, and I set off into the Marais, hungry from missed meals the day before and carrying a backpack too heavy with books. Sunlight through plane trees, the streets still quiet. Old stone, balconies, geraniums, city squares with those perfectly geometric arrangements of trees and municipal planting that we don’t do in England.
Continue reading...She cooked his weird dinners, dealt with his volcanic rants, and read his prose back to him from dark till dawn. As Chloe Sells’ photographs of the gonzo writer’s chaotic Colorado cabin are published, she remembers an invigorating, inspirational figure
One evening towards the end of 2003, Chloe Sells was entering the J-Bar in Aspen, Colorado, in search of a late night drink, when an older woman approached her. As Sells recalls in her new photobook, Hot Damn!: “She looked me up and down and said, ‘We’re looking for some help for Hunter. Are you a night owl? Would you be interested?’”
Hunter, as every local knew, was Hunter S Thompson, the celebrated creator of “gonzo” journalism, and the town’s most infamous resident. The woman was his wife, Anita. “It took me only a moment,” Sells says, “to answer ‘Yes’ to everything.”
Continue reading...The author is being held after tweets criticising President Yoweri Museveni and his son
Ugandan satirical novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, who was named International Writer of Courage by PEN last year, has been illegally detained and tortured for criticising the president and his son, his lawyer said.
Gunmen came to the writer’s house on 28 December after a series of tweets about the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, including one calling him a thief and his son and presumed successor “an incompetent pig-headed curmudgeon”.
Continue reading...To Paradise, the new novel from the writer of A Little Life, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. But where did she get the unflinching eye she turns on America’s idea of itself?
Hanya Yanagihara’s debut novel taught her not to give up her day job as a travel writer and editor. The People in the Trees was the story of a scientist jailed for sexually abusing children he adopted during his Nobel-winning research on a Pacific island. It impressed reviewers with its exhaustive inventiveness and its refusal to offer redemption or solace, but sold only a few thousand copies when it was published in 2013.
Two years later, the Manhattan-based writer released a novel that was twice as long and even less forgiving. It was about the fallout, among four college friends, from the appalling childhood sexual abuse of one of their group, and it hit the jackpot, becoming one of those vanishingly rare literary break-outs. Victoria Beckham and Dua Lipa declared themselves fans, while an equally passionate group of readers condemned it as gratuitous, even “evil”. A Little Life sold a quarter of a million print copies in the UK alone, where it was shortlisted for the Booker and the Women’s prize for fiction. But far from giving up her day job, Yanagihara took on a bigger one, as editor-in-chief of T, the New York Times style magazine.
Continue reading...In college I worked as a tour guide on the Costa del Sol. It was a weird scene. I saw some wild stuff; some violence I’d like to forget. I lived in one hotel room with four or five people for a while. I worked in a discotheque. But it inspired my first attempt at really writing. I needed to get it all down.
I think most writers have impostor syndrome. On the one hand you think, “I suck, I’ve got nothing to say, this isn’t working at all,” and the next moment you have the hubris to say, “I’m going to write 500 pages and people are going to pay me to read it.”
Continue reading...The actor knew her father had served in the merchant navy, but it wasn’t until she read about Britain’s mistreatment of Chinese seamen in the 40s that she understood just how much his experiences had shaped her family
“Take the rest of the noodles and the pak choi and you can have it for your lunch tomorrow.” My dad pushed the takeaway containers and their remaining contents across the table towards me.
“I’ve got loads of food at mine, why don’t you and Mum keep it?” I protested. I knew he’d insist I take the leftovers with me. This routine would always play out at the end of family dinners once I’d left home and, this time around, it felt both familiar and oddly comforting – because it had been a while since our last dinner.
Continue reading...Restoring and moving 750,000 volumes and ancient manuscripts expected to take five years
It is known as Ireland’s “front room”, where esteemed visitors including the Queen, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been taken to get a sense of the “land of saints and scholars”.
Biden, vice-president at the time, was so moved by the atmospherics in the dimly lit, barrel-vaulted hall when he visited Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 2016 that he came back a year later to contemplate the history of its old library, known as the Long Room.
Continue reading...Filippo Bernardini is accused of impersonating publishing figures to steal manuscripts, in scam that has stumped authors and editors for years
A mysterious fraudster who impersonated publishers and agents to steal book manuscripts in an international phishing scam may have finally been caught, with the FBI arresting a 29-year-old man at John F Kennedy airport in New York on Wednesday.
Filippo Bernardini, an Italian citizen who worked at UK publisher Simon & Schuster, was arrested upon landing in the US on Wednesday. The FBI alleged that Bernardini had “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” to obtain unpublished and draft works.
Continue reading...Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, adapted from the short novel by Elena Ferrante, unravels the myth that motherhood comes naturally to women
It is clear from the opening minutes of The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s melancholic, bristly directorial debut on Netflix, that a dark secret stalks the sunny Mediterranean vacation of Leda Caruso, (a luminous Olivia Colman), a 48-year-old English professor of comparative literature. Her “working holiday” at a Greek island is immediately beset by increasingly ominous intrusions: a spectral foghorn, a bowl of rotting fruit, a shrill cicada, a boisterous Italian American family from Queens who disrupt her beachside reading. Memories pull at her focus; when the young daughter of Nina (Dakota Johnson), a beautiful, languid member of the Queens bunch who immediately catches Leda’s attention, goes briefly missing, Nina’s panic elides with a flashback to twentysomething Leda’s (Jessie Buckley) frantic search for her daughter Bianca at a beach.
It’s a familiar language of buried secrets, sinister subtext and unspooling memories – the building blocks of suspense – but the landmines in The Lost Daughter aren’t the usual culprits of dark revelation: unspeakable trauma or abuse, evil spirits, suppressed desires, the ravages of capitalism or greed. Instead, the molten core of The Lost Daughter is one of our culture’s most enduring and least touchable taboos: the selfish, uncaring, “unnatural” mother – one who doesn’t shift easily to care-taking, who does not relish her role, who not only begrudges but resents her children.
Continue reading...Michele Rech aka Zerocalcare’s book signings attract huge crowds and now he has a hit Netflix animated series inspired by his life
Michele Rech is uncomfortable with success. The shy 38-year-old comic book artist, who works from a modest apartment on the outskirts of Rome, does not use the word “fame” but refers instead to his rise to national prominence as a “thing” he struggles to manage.
In the art world, he is known as Zerocalcare and is the cartoonist’s equivalent of Hunter S Thompson. Rech’s graphic novels are a form of gonzo journalism – inspired by his own adventures as a protester on the frontlines of police violence in Italy, and in Syria, where he was embedded with Kurdish forces.
Continue reading...Lea Ypi says vocal minority of Albanians have sent torrent of online insults criticising her bestseller, Free
A memoir about growing up before and after the fall of communism in Albania has won rave reviews in the west but has prompted “vicious” abuse from a vocal minority of Albanians, its author says.
Free by Lea Ypi, a Marxist Albanian professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, might seem an unlikely bestseller.
Continue reading...Scribbling down our thoughts is a great way to make sense of things – and very satisfying
In 1989, when I was 16, I moved into a pub with my parents and my younger brother, Matty. It was highly exciting. I took to barwork as I liked the chat, and also enjoyed the opportunities offered for eavesdropping. I was curious about the adult world and up until then had learned most of what I knew from books. Now I had all these real lives to study. I should write some of this down, I thought, and would scribble into my diary before bed.
We couldn’t believe how busy it was that first Christmas, culminating on New Year’s Eve, when everyone piled out into the main street at midnight and exchanged drunken embraces and warm wishes for 1990. After the pub had emptied and the mammoth job of clearing up was done, we gathered with our staff for a few drinks and the chat turned to resolutions. All the women wanted to lose weight. A couple of people wanted to stop smoking. I announced very firmly that I wanted to write a novel.
Continue reading...Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can
When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.
Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would.
Continue reading...A new book outlines the mistakes and missteps that made UK pandemic worse
There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.
And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter on Balenciaga’s visions, the mountains of North Carolina, and the haunting power of Eve’s Bayou
Singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, 29, grew up between Ghana and California and studied creative writing and poetry at UCLA. His piercing falsetto and genre-defying music have brought him critical acclaim, starting with his self-recorded 2014 EP Mid-City Island, followed in 2017 by his debut album, Aromanticism, and the 2020 double album Græ. Sumney has collaborated with musicians including Bon Iver and James Blake and toured with Solange and Sufjan Stevens. His latest project is Blackalachia, a self-directed concert film created in association with WePresent, shot over two days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, where he lives.
Continue reading...The Dressmaker author says literary events in country Australia are all about ‘discussing, catching up and laughing’. Here are some planned for 2022
Rural readers are in for a bumper crop of established and emerging writers festivals taking place in country regions throughout 2022, a harvest that also offers plenty of flavour to city-dwelling book lovers seeking literary-themed getaways.
Jerilderie-born author of The Dressmaker, Rosalie Ham, says events in the bush have always provided a great excuse for a reunion of like minds. Her extensive literary circuit all began with an invitation to talk at a writers festival in country Victoria.
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