The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

A professional sumo tournament in London in October 2025 offered more than sporting spectacle. It became a lens through which to view Japan’s growing cultural pull in the West, a society where ancient ritual, hierarchy and Shinto belief coexist with hyper-modern life. Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Christopher Harding to explore how Japan balances tradition and modernity, and why that balanc...

Born into a Muslim family in Bombay, India, in 1947, two months before the country’s partition, educated in the UK and now resident in New York, Salman Rushdie is a writer of multiple, interconnected worlds. At the heart of his work – ever since he won the 1982 Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children – has been some kind of history: the world’s, his own, or both at once.  The latest chapter in...

The youngest winner of the Booker Prize fell silent for nearly 20 years. Now she's back with a new novel. -- With only her second novel The Inheritance of Loss , Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize, the leading literary prize in the global Anglosphere, becoming - at the time - the youngest person ever to do so. She was thirty-five. Then: silence. 19 years of it, before another novel emerged - th...

The experimental novelist on finding God, being "a misfit" and her return to writing. -- Nicola Barker is "has broken the mould so many times it's almost beyond repair". She's a post-punk literary anarchist who writes from the peripheries of the UK. Her experiments with narrative form have won her many plaudits, including the Goldsmith's Prize for literary fiction, which the New Statesman partners...

Cinephiles are revisiting Whit Stillman's 90's movies. Tanjil Rashid meets Stillman to find out why. -- Whit Stillman is something of a cult film director. He rose to prominence in 1990 with his debut film Metropolitan , which became the first in the so-called “Doomed. Bourgeois. In love” trilogy: Barcelona came out in 1994 and The Last Days of Disco in 1998. Set among America’s so-called “Preppy”...