By this author
Culture September 21, 2019
A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man
The cultural historian and essayist Maria Tumarkin once described an essay as “a dramatisation of a writer’s mind at work”. Ender Başkan’s A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man, though a novel, takes this dictum as its primary motivating …
Culture May 25, 2019
The Other Americans
How strange it is to know someone, perhaps even intimately, yet be utterly blind to them at the same time. But how much of that is a wilful blindness? Laila Lalami, who has built her reputation as a novelist on keenly observing the gaps of understanding …
Culture June 22, 2019
The White Girl
In critical appraisals of Tony Birch’s fiction, certain adjectives appear again and again. Of the prose: “spare”, “concise”, “uncluttered”; the characters “vivid” and rendered with “compassion”. Perhaps it is true that good novels, …
Culture May 04, 2019
The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela
When she died last year at the age of 81, the public conversation about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s legacy arranged itself around two poles: her long and turbulent marriage to Nelson Mandela, and her image as a tragic figure. But Winnie Mandela was …
