Little Atoms

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...

Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include:  Village of Stone , shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize;  A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers , shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and  I Am China . Her recent memoir,  Once Upon a Time in the East , won the National Book Critics Circle Aw...

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood), and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews, Climbing Days, and Outpost. Only After Dark, a BBC Radio 4 series about the nocturnal world, was broadcast to acclaim in 2022. Dan has written for the Guardian, Economist, Esquire and Monocle. On this...

Dani Heywood-Lonsdale has paternal roots on the tiny island of Molokai, Hawaii - referred to as the Sandwich Islands throughout her debut novel The Portrait Artist  - and maternal roots in the Philippines. She is a Faber Academy alumna and teaches English Literature in Oxfordshire. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Abdulrazak Gurnah   is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels:  Memory of Departure ,  Pilgrims Way ,  Dottie ,  Paradise  (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award),  Admiring Silence ,  By the Sea  (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the  Los Angeles Times  Book Award...

Sarah Hesketh is a writer and editor from Pendle, in East Lancashire. She is the author of the poetry collections  Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf and  The Hard Word Box , and the editor of  The Emma Press Anthology of Age . She currently lives in London and works as Managing Editor for  Modern Poetry in Translation . On this week’s episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Den...

Stephen May is the author of seven novels including  Life! Death! Prizes!  which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and is a winner of the Media Wales Reader’s Prize. He has also written plays, as well as for television and film. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil...

Susan Barker is the author of four books. Her third novel,  The Incarnations,  was a  New York Times  Editors' Choice and Notable Book, a  Kirkus Reviews'  Top Ten Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Old Soul . An excerpt from  Old Soul  won a N...

Rachel Bower is an award-winning poet and short story writer from Bradford. She is the author of two poetry collections and a non-fiction book on literary letters. Her poems and stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including The London Magazine, The White Review, Magma and Stand. Bower won The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2019/20 and the W&A Short Story Competition 20...

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellows...

Catherine Airey grew up in England in a family of mixed English-Irish descent, and now lives between County Cork and Bristol. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel  Confessions . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Keon West   is a social psychologist at the University of London. He earned his doctorate from Oxford University in 2010 as a Rhodes Scholar and has since published more than seventy quantitative papers on prejudice and discrimination in many of the best peer-reviewed social-psychology journals, including Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, The Journal of Experimental Social...

Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. Bellies, her debut, won the Polari First Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards and Mo Siewcharran Prize, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. On this week's episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her...

Sumit Paul-Choudhury is an astrophysicist-turned-journalist, former editor-in-chief of  New Scientist  magazine and has served as a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize (then Samuel Johnson Prize), the Wellcome Prize and the Costa Book Awards. On this week’s episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new book The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change...

Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster based in London. He is the author of The Bright Labyrinth , Welcome To Mars, The Space Oracle and Destroy All Monsters . His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Noon and Satori, and in numerous anthologies and collections, as well as in features and series for BBC Radio 3...