Little Atoms

Kiran Desai   is the bestselling author of two novels,  Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard  and  The Inheritance of Loss , which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her new Booker Prize Shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of  The Amber Fury ,  The Children of Jocasta ,  A Thousand Ships , which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and  Stone Blind . Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth,  Pandora’s Jar , was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. She has written and performed eleven series of her BB...

Patrick Ryan's short story collection  The Dream Life of Astronauts  was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the  St. Louis Times-Dispatch, LitHub, Refinery 29  and  Electric Literature , and was longlisted for The Story Prize. His debut collection of linked short stories,  Send Me , was chosen for Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers program. His work has...

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels  Women Talking ,  All My Puny Sorrows ,  Summer of My Amazing Luck ,  A Boy of Good Breeding ,  A Complicated Kindness ,  The Flying Troutmans ,  Irma Voth ,  Fight Night  and one work of non-fiction,  Swing Low: A Life . She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris A...

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of  Wise Men ,  The Inseparables ,  Rooms for Vanishing  and a story collection,  The Book of Life . His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the...

Since Laura Lippman's debut, she has been recognised as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her "special, even extraordinary," and Gillian Flynn wrote, "She is simply a brilliant novelist." Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five lan...

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London. On this episode of Little Atoms, he talks to Neil Denny about Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World, his first book for which he was the recipient of the 2023 RSL Giles St Aubyn Award, awarded for debut works of non-fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She was educated in the US and now lives in London. Her first novel  Golden Child  won multiple prizes and was named one of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World’. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her Booker Prize long listed new novel Love Forms . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more in...

Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history and contributes regularly to the  London Review of Books  and the  Wall Street Journal.  His previous books  o n the history of drugs include  High Society, Mescaline  and  Psychonauts. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Free Radicals: How a Group of...

Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and former editor of  Medical Humanities , a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including  Scientific American ,  Wired ,  CrimeReads , and  Undark . She has previously appeared on Little Atoms talking about her books Death’s Summer...

Wendy Erskine is the author of two short story collections,  Sweet Home  and  Dance Move . She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and  Sunday Times  Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers' Choice Award. She edited the art anthology&nbs...

David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David's first book,  Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils , looked at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future. It was published in March 2020 with both  The Times  and  The Telegraph  naming it a book of the...

Marie Rutkoski is a  New York Times  bestselling author of several novels for children and young adults. She grew up in Illinois as the oldest of four children, and has lived in Moscow, Prague, and Paris. She holds degrees from the University of Iowa and Harvard University, and is now a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College, where she teaches Shakespeare, children's literat...

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 collection  We Move  won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his debut novel Saraswati. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. Her debut novel,  Briefly, a Delicious Life  was longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Award. She is also the author of  Bleaker House  and  Mrs Gaskell & Me , which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Her writing is published in  The New York...

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels  American Dream Machine  and  That Summertime Sound,  and the nonfiction books  The Sting  and  Always Crashing in the Same Car . His writing has appeared in the  New York Times , the  Paris Review ,  The Believer ,  Tin House ,  Vogue ,  GQ ,  Black Clock , and&nb...

Francesca Wade is the author of  Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars , which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appea...

Daria Lavelle writes fiction, most of which features at least one impossible thing. Her stories have appeared in  Dark Matter ,  The Deadlands  and  Dread Machine , among others. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and enjoys opera, escape rooms, and checking restaurants off her bucket list. She was born in Kyiv before immigrati...

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning poet and author of  Boy Friends , which was a  Sunday Times  Critics Choice and shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish National Book Awards. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and is the current Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, and Edinburgh's Makar. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his...

Cate Baum was born in Cambridge to a magician and a big band singer. She grew up in the East Anglian countryside, spending summers roaming the wilds of the UK. She studied screenwriting at UCLA and gained a master’s with Distinction in Creative Writing from City, University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel Land of Hope . Hosted on Acast. See...

Eley Williams' collection of short stories Attrib. & Other Stories won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her writing appears in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Liberating the Canon, the TLS and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of the novel The Liar’s Dictionary...

Simon Park is Associate Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is an expert in the literature and material culture of the early modern world, particularly from Portugal and its vast global empire. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new book Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of...

Danielle Giles is a writer and researcher based in Bristol. She has been published (writing as Danielle Vrublevskis) in Extra Teeth and Dear Damsels, shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. She won the Local Prize in the 2023 Bath Short Story Award. On this episode of Little Atom...

Megan Hunter is a prizewinning novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Her first novel,  The End We Start From  was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Books Are My Bag Awards, longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Awards finalist and won the Forward Reviews Editor’s Choice Award. It was adapted into a major motion picture by Alice Birch, starring Jodie...

Ron Currie is the award-winning author of five novels. He has won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, the Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. As a screenwriter he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ ser...