Little Atoms

Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the  Guardian ,  Huffington Post ,  Telegraph  and  Times Higher Education  among others, and is a columnist for  BBC History Magazine . Fern is the author of The Victorian Guide to Sex , and most rece...

Garth Greenwell is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His novella  Mitko  won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award. His novel  What Belongs to You  has been widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest book is Cleanness...

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist.  The Mercies  is her first novel for adults. Her bestselling works for children include  The Girl of Ink & Stars  and have won numerous awards including the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and the Blackwell's Children's Book of the Year. They ha...

Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC Short Story Award in 2018. She read law at the LSE and was a legal academic before taking degrees in fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London and Central Saint Martins. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Prospect and Pree magazines. Her debut novel is Love After Love . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pr...

Philip Hensher has written  eleven  novels , including The Mulberry Empire , the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency , King of the Badgers , The Friendly Ones and Scenes from Early Life , which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012. He is Professor of Creative  Writing  at the University of Bath Spa, and his latest novel is A Small Revolution in Germany . Hosted on Acast. See aca...

Eimear McBride is the author of the novels  The Lesser Bohemians  (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and  A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing  (winner of the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, and others). She was the inaugural creative fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading,...

Rosanna Amaka was born to African and Caribbean parents. She began writing her debut novel The Books of Echoes twenty years ago to give voice to the Brixton community in which she grew up. Her community was fast disappearing – as a result of gentrification, emigration back to the Caribbean and Africa, or simply with the passing away of the older generation. Its depiction of unimaginable pain redee...

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist.  Maggie & Me , his memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher's Britain, was a BBC Radio 4  Book of the Week  and  Sunday Times  Memoir of the Year, and won the Paddy Power Political Books 'Satire' Award and Stonewall Writer of the Year Award. Damian writes columns for the  Big Issue  and ...

Stephen Moss is a naturalist, broadcaster, television producer and author. In a distinguished career at the BBC Natural History Unit his credits included  Springwatch ,  Birds Britannia  and  The Nature of Britain . His books include  The Robin: A Biography ,  A Bird in the Bush ,  The Bumper Book of Nature ,  Wild Hares and Hummingbirds ...

Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a novelist from South London. She is also a trustee of Latin American Women's Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe for and by Latin American Women. Her debut novel Stubborn Archivist was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and is now out in paperback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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...