Little Atoms

Tim Winton has published over twenty books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into many different languages. Since his first novel,  An Open Swimmer , won the  Australian /Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for  Shallows ,  Cloudstreet ,  Dirt Music  and  Breath ) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker P...

Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2016, she w...

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...

Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including  Mitchell & Webb  and  Very British Problems . He previously worked as a junior doctor, detailing his funny and sad experiences in his first book  This Is Going To Hurt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Inara Verzemnieks teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. She is the author of Among The Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel Trilling is the editor of  New Humanist  magazine and has reported extensively on refugees in Europe. His work has been published in the  London Review of Books ,  Guardian ,  New York Times  and others, and won a 2017 Migration Media Award. His first book,  Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain’s Far Right , was longlisted for the 2013 Orwell Prize. Da...

Aida Edemariam, whose father is Ethiopian and mother Canadian, grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto, and has worked as a journalist in New York, Toronto and London, where she is currently a senior feature writer and editor for the  Guardian . Her first book is The Wife’s Tale. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

Ziyad Marar   is the author of  Intimacy  (2014),  Deception (The Art of Living)  (2008) and  The Happiness Paradox  (2003) and is President of Global Publishing at Sage Publications. His latest book is Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lucy Wood is the critically acclaimed author of Diving Belles, a collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore, and Weathering, a debut novel about mothers, daughters and ghosts. She has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, and was runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has also received a Betty Trask A...

Chris Power lives and works in London. His 'Brief Survey of the Short Story' has appeared in the  Guardian  since 2007. His fiction has been published in  The Stinging Fly ,  The Dublin Review  and  The White Review .  Mothers  is his first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the first female author to win two National Book Awards for Fiction, for  Sing, Unburied, Sing  (2017) and  Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the editor of the anthol...

Leo Benedictus is a freelance feature writer for the Guardian and other publications. His first novel, The Afterparty was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. His latest novel is Consent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the third of our shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Dr Kathryn Mannix about her book With The End in Mind. Kathryn Mannix has spent her medical career working with people who have incurable, advanced illnesses. Starting in cancer care and changing career to become a pioneer of the new discipline of palliative medicine, she has worked in teams in...

In the Second of three shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Lindsey Fitzharris about The Butchering Art, and Ayobami Adebayo about her novel Stay With Me. Lindsey Fitzharris received her doctorate in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Wellcome Institute....

Jillian Scudder is an astrophysicist and assistant professor at Oberlin College, Ohio. She has been writing ‘Astroquizzical’, a blog answering space-related questions from the public, for over five years. Her writing has also been published in Forbes, Quartz, Medium, and The Conversation. Astroquizzical is Jillian’s first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first of three shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Meredith Wadman about The Vaccine Race, and Sigrid Rausing about Mayhem: A Memoir. Meredith Wadman, MD, has a long profile as a medical reporter and has covered biomedical research politics from Washington, DC, for twenty years. She has written for Nature, Fortune, The New York Times,&nbs...

Dr David Adam is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop and an editor at Nature, the world’s top scientific journal. Before that he was a specialist correspondent on the Guardian for seven years, writing on science, medicine and the environment. During this time he was named feature writer of the year by the Association of Brit...

Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels  The Hired Man ,  The Memory of Love  and  Ancestor Stones , and the memoir  The Devil that Danced on the Water . Her books have won multiple prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Book Award, and been shortlisted for many others, among them the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Neustadt Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and...

David Hepworth has been writing, broadcasting and speaking about music and media since the seventies. He was involved in the launch and editing of magazines such as Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, among many others. He was one of the presenters of the BBC rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test and one of the anchors of the corporation’s coverage of Live...

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of eleven previous books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Harvest (shortlisted for the 2...

The 500th Little Atoms! Philip Hensher has written nine novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers and Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa. Philip's latest novel is The Friendly Ones. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informati...

Cathi Unsworth began a career in journalism at nineteen on the music weekly Sounds, and has since worked for music, arts, film and lifestyle journals. She is the author of five previous novels: Weirdo, The Not Knowing, The Singer, Bad Penny Blues and Without the Moon, and edited the award-winning compendium London Noir. Her latest novel is That Old Blac...

Matthew Sweet is a journalist and broadcaster. He presents  Night Waves  and  Freethinking  on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of  The Film Programme  on Radio Four. He is the author of  The West End Front ,  Inventing   the   Victorians  and  Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema , which he adapted as a...

Neil talks feminist heroes with author Julia Pierpoint Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Liam Drew is a writer, former neurobiologist and mammal. He has a PhD in sensory biology from University College London, and spent twelve years researching the neural and genetic basis of schizophrenia, the biology of pain and the birth of new neurons in the adult mammalian brain at Columbia University, New York and at UCL. His writing has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Slate and the...