Little Atoms

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...

Born in Sydney, Tim Baker lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about jazz. He has worked on film projects in India, China, Mexico, Brazil and Australia, and currently lives in the South of France with his wife, their son, and two rescue animals, a dog and a cat. His debut novel,  Fever City , was published in 2016 and went on to be shortlisted for the CWA’s John Cre...

Abi Andrews was born in 1991 in the Midlands, and now lives and works in South East London. She studied English and creative writing at Goldsmiths, and her work has been published in The Dark Mountain Project, Tender, Five Dials and The Bohemyth, amongst others. Her debut novel is The Word for Woman is Wilderness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for m...

Daniel H. Pink  is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling Drive, To Sell is Human and A Whole New Mind. His books have been translated into 35 languages and have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. Dan's latest book is When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Discontent and its Civilisations. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York. His latest novel Exit West was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Pri...

Tony White  is the author of novels including Foxy-T, the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans and editor and co-editor of short story collections including Croatian Nights, with numerous short stories published in journals, exhibition catalogues and collections including All Hail the New Puritans. Tony has been writer in residence at the Science Museum,...

Ausma Zehanat Khan holds a Ph. D. in International Human Rights Law with a specialisation in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. She has practised immigration law and taught human rights law at Northwestern University and York University. Formerly, she served as Editor in Chief of Muslim Girl magazine, the first magazine to reflect the lives of young Muslim women. She is...

Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. From 2002 to 2005 he was a senior editor at OpenDemocracy. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is the autho...

George Orwell wrote some of his most renowned essays for the British left-wing publication Tribune between 1940 and 1947, including Books vs Cigarettes, You And The Atom Bomb and the regular As I Please column. These works were compiled by Paul Anderson in the book Orwell in Tribune . Paul Anderson is a former editor of  Tribune  and deputy editor of the  New Statesman . He tal...

A classic Little Atoms from 2010 to ease you into the new year: Professor Brian Cox takes on the big questions, including what happens if you put a cat in a Large Hadron Collider Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You , won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the American Library Association's Alex Award. She is a 2016 National Endowment for t...