Little Atoms

Stephen Trombley's most recent books are Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World (2012) and A Short History of Western Thought (2011). For 15 years he co-edited The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought with Alan Bullock. His latest book is Wise Words: The Philosophy of Everyday Life. This show also features a catch up with Johann Hari on the paperback release of his book Chasing the Scream: The...

Alexander Jan leads the City Economics team at engineering and consultancy firm Arup and is a columnist for City AMAlex Ingram is a cycling campaigner with groups in Lewisham and Islington and with national campaigns. He blogs at Alex in the Cities(alexinthecities.co.uk)Kate Arnell is a TV presenter who currently presents BBC America's Anglophenia. She has a blog oneco-living at EcoBoost (eco-boos...

The last of our three shows for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize, with shortlisted authors Steve Silberman & Sarah Moss. The Wellcome Book Prize 2016 winner will be announced on Monday 25th April. Thanks again to Chris, Alice and Fiona at FMcM Associates for arranging these interviews. Steve Silberman is an award-winning investigative reporter and has covered science and cultural affairs for Wired and...

Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, first working at The Royal London Hospital and now as a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, and for a specialist unit based at the Epilepsy Society. In that role she has developed an expertise in working with patients with psychogenic disorders alongside he...

The first of three shows for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize, with shortlisted authors Cathy Rentzenbrink & Alex Pheby. Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, Grew up in Yorkshire and now lives in London. A former bookseller at Waterstones, she was until recently Project Director of the charity Quick Reads, and is currently books editor at the Bookseller magazine. Her first book, The Last Act of Lo...

A recording of the first Little Atoms live event at Waterstones Piccadilly in which we host the launch of Mollly Crabapple’s book Drawing Blood. An acclaimed artist and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Paris Review, and in her regular column in Vice (among many other venues), Molly Crabapple has swiftly become one of the most provocative – and most-wat...

The Penderyn Music Book Prize is organised by Richard Thomas, founder of the Laugharne Weekend Festival, and is the only UK-based book prize specifically for music titles including history, theory, biography and autobiography. The winner will be announced at the Laugharne Weekend Festival on 3rd April 2016. In this special edition of Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks with shortlisted authors Stuart C...

Ioan Grillo has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media including Time magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle, the BBC World Service and the Sunday Telegraph. His first book, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, was translated into five languages and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orwell Prize. A native of Bri...

DJ Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. He has written eleven novels, the most recent being The Windsor Faction. He’s also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945. His journa...

For the last two years Little Atoms has partnered with the Wellcome Book Prize, broadcasting interviews with the shortlisted authors. We’ll be doing the same this year, and to mark the announcement of the 2016 shortlist on Monday 14th March, here’s a bonus episode. This is a recording of a conversation between previous winners Andrew Solomon and Marion Coutts, which took place at Libreria bookshop...

Harry Parker grew up in Wiltshire. He was educated at Falmouth College of Art and University College London. He joined the British Army when he was 23 and served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009 as a Captain. He is now a writer and artist and lives in London. Harry’s first novel is Anatomy of a Soldier. Andrew Hankinson is a journalist who was born, raised, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne....

Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist based in London. She has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London, and an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College London. She has worked as an editor at New Scientist and at Nature and her articles have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Wired, and The Observer Rev...

Maria Konnikova was born in Moscow, Russia and came to the United States when she was four years old. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a regular column with a focus on psychology and culture, and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Observer, and Scientific American, among numerous other publications. She is the auth...

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a PhD then a postdoc at the University of York before realising that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than spending hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. She went on to run outreach in engineering, computing, physics and maths at the University of Surrey, and is now a freelance science communicator delivering talks...

Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely (2007) and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including My Last Confession (2009), The Donor (2011) and most recently The Cry (2013), which was longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Helen has worked as a criminal justice social worker for over ten years. Now based in Scotland, she grew up in Victoria,...

Matthew Kneale studied Modern History at Oxford University. He is the author of several novels, including English Passengers which won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest book is An Atheist’s History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention. Also this week, columnist Suzanne Moore on A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich. Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...

Philip Hoare is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed biography of Noel Coward, and Leviathan or, The Whale, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Lever...

Rana Dasgupta won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury in 1971, he has lived in Delhi for 13 years. Also this week, writ...

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review,Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain. His latest books are Landscapes of Communism, and The M...

A special edition of Little Atoms for Resonance FM’s fundraising week. Recorded live at The Slaughtered Lamb on 10th February 2014.Is Music Journalism in a Critical Condition? The UK music scene once supported four weekly music papers, which wielded the power to form the musical agenda in a way that’s unimaginable today. Of these, only the NME staggers on in managed decline, along with an ever dwi...

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Aleks writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast....

James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology. In 2011, he coined the term “New Aesthetic”, and his ongoing r...

Irving Finkel is an archaeologist and Assyriologist, currently Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He’s also an expert on the history of board games, and the founder of the Great Diary Project. Irving is the author of numerous books, most recently The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Al...

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much distortion. Influenced by a technologically dystopian present and an apocalyptically likely future, they tend to be found filling venues, galleries or headphones with different kinds of noise in their on...

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He later ran consular operations in France and North Africa for the Australian embassy, liaising with international authorities on cases involving murder, kidnap, terrorism and disappearances. His fiction inclu...