Little Atoms

Ben Halls is a London-based writer and journalist. He worked in pubs, off licences and several minimum wage jobs before deciding to return to school to pursue his passion for writing. In 2014 Ben completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and completed his Master of Fine Arts at Kingston University in 2016.  The Quarry  is...

Peter Swanson's novels include  The Girl With a Clock for a Heart , nominated for an  LA Times  book award,  The Kind Worth Killing , a Richard and Judy pick and the iBooks store's thriller of the year in 2015, and, most recently,  Before She Knew Him . His latest novel is Rules For Perfect Murders . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rosamund Lupton is the author of  Sister,  a BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime", a  Sunday Times  and  New York Times bestseller, winner of the Strand Magazine critics award and the Richard and Judy Bookclub Readers' Choice Award. Her next two books  Afterwards  and  The Quality of Silence  (also a Richard and Judy pick) were S unday Times bestsellers. Her b...

Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at  Nature  and  New Scientist , and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the  Guardian ,  The Times  and  Scientific American . She also writes and presents science programmes...

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels  Clay  and  At Hawthorn Time , which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, and one work of non-fiction,  Rain , which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She is a nature writer, critic and columnist for  The Times , the  Financial Times  and the  Guardian,&nb...

Lauren Groff is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels – Fates and Furies (named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015), The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia – as well as the story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Groff’s fiction ha...

Eoin Colfer is the author of the internationally bestselling Artemis Fowl series, which has been translated into over forty languages. A Disney film adaptation will be released in 2019, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Dame Judi Dench. Eoin's books have won numerous awards including The British Children's Book of the Year, The Irish Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and The German Ch...

An Yu was born and raised in Beijing, and left at the age of eighteen to study in New York at NYU. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English. Braised Pork is her debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ziya Tong is on the board of WWF International and was formerly the Vice Chair of WWF Canada. She presented  Daily Planet , Discovery Channel's flagship science programme, until its final season in 2018. Tong also hosted the CBC's Emmy-nominated series  ZeD , PBS' national prime-time series,  Wired Science , and worked as a correspondent for NOVA  scienceNOW . She is the a...

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning,  New York Times  bestselling author of  Brain on Fire:   My Month of Madness,  a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain, which was made into a film by Netflix. Her latest book is  The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness . Hosted on Acast. See acast....

Romesh Gunesekera is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction including  Reef , which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize,  The Sandglass , winner of the inaugural BBC Asia Award, and  The Match , the ground-breaking cricket novel. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages and he is the recipient of many awards including a Premio Mondello in Italy. He was bor...

James Meek is the author of six novels including  The People's Act of Love  which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. It has been published in more than thirty countries. Meek's last novel  The Heart Broke In  was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and he has also written...

Padraig Reidy hosts this episode, joined by Caleb Klaces to discuss his debut novel Fatherhood . They talk about the place of being a father today, the value of home and the novel as an adult bildungsroman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emma Forrest has published three novels, an essay collection and the memoir  Your Voice In My Head . An Anglo-American currently based in London, she recently wrote and directed her feature debut,  Untogether . Her latest novel is Royals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode Neil speaks to Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman. She was named journalist of the year (Press Gazette) and won the 2018 Paul Foot journalism award for her reportage on the Windrush scandal, which led to the downfall of the Home Secretary and the government loosening its ‘hostile environment’ policy for migrants. She tells Neil about her new book The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the...

David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author of two novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device , which won the Collyer Bristow/London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, and For The Good Times which won the Gordon Burn Prize. He is also the author of England...

Téa Obreht is the author of The Tiger's Wife , winner of the Orange Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and her latest novel is Inland . She was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Padraig Reidy hosts this week, speaking to Guardian journalist and author Henry McDonald about his novel Two Souls . They talk punk, football and paramilitary activity in 70s and 80s Belfast, and how a few wrong choices changed the path of young men's lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Neil speaks to Sarah Perry, author of the bestselling The Essex Serpent , which won Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 and Book of the Year 2017 at the British Book Awards. Her latest novel is  Melmoth . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elle Nash is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in  Cosmopolitan, Elle, NAILED, Reality Beach, Hobart,  and other places. She was a member of the Denver Press Club and now lives in Arkansas. Occasionally she reads tarot in exchange for money. Her debut novel is  Animals Eat Each Other . Hosted on Acast. See acast...

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She is a staff writer at  The New Yorker , and her work has appeared in  The New York Times  and  The New Republic , among other publications. She is the author of  Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and...

Author and music journalist David Stubbs joins Neil to talk about his latest book Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music . They chat about the evolution of synthesisers, the women who pioneered electronic music and where the genre is now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of five previous books of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel,  The Shadow of the Crescent Moon , was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the memoir about her father’s life and assassination,  Songs of Blood and Sword , was published to acclaim. Her most...

Lillian Li joins Neil to talk about her debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant , which was longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelist Ben Fergusson joins Neil to talk about An Honest Man , the final book of his Berlin Trilogy. They discuss writing against the backdrop of 1989 Berlin, the summer after leaving school, and the novel's parallels between relationships, infidelity and espionage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.