Little Atoms

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...

Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey became one of the first Black Women members of the House of Lords in 2004. Raised in foster care in North London, she studied at the New College of Speech and Drama, then worked as an actress, before becoming Professor of Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. Later, she worked in arts administration before receiving an OBE in 2001 and becoming an independent cros...

Miranda Sawyer has written about pop music since 1988, beginning on  Smash Hits  before moving to  Select ,  The Face  and the  Observer . Her first book  Park and Ride  explored the British suburbs, her second  Out of Time  exploded the midlife crisis. On. This week’s episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest book Uncommon P...

Niall Williams was born in Dublin. He is the author of nine novels, including  History of the Rain , which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and  Four Letters of Love , which will soon be a major motion picture starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter, and Gabriel Byrne. His most recent novel,  This Is Happiness  was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Book of the...

Simon Critchley has published books on a wide expanse of ethical and philosophical subjects, including the bestselling  The Book of Dead Philosophers , his cult novel  Memory Theatre  and his memoir-analysis of David Bowie -  On Bowie . He is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. On this week's episode of Little Atoms he talk...

Jeff Young is a writer for stage, screen and radio. Until recently a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, he is the author of the acclaimed memoir Ghost Town . On this week’s episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new memoir Wild Twin . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of seven novels, including  The Devil and Webster ,  You Should Have Known  (adapted as the 2020 HBO series  The Undoing , starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland),  Admission  (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin and Paul Rudd),  The White Rose ,  The Sabbathday River,...

Jonathan Coe was born a few miles from Bournville in 1961. The author of political satires such as  Bournville ,  What a Carve Up!  and  Number 11 , and family sagas such as  The Rotters' Club  and  The Rain Before It Falls , his novels have won prizes at home and abroad, including Costa Novel of the Year and the Prix du Livre Européen. On this episode of little...

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels,  The Innocents  (2012) and  The Awkward Age  (2017), and a memoir of NICU motherhood,  Mother Ship  (2019). Her writing has won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, a Betty Trask Award, and been longlisted for the Women's Prize. On today’s episode of Litt...

Dava Sobel is the internationally renowned author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter . She was an award-winning former science reporter for the ‘New York Times’ and writes frequently about science for several magazines, including the ‘New Yorker’, ‘Audubon’, ‘Discover’, ‘Life’ and ‘Omni’. On today’s episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest book The Elements of Marie Curie:...

Xan Brooks is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He was one of the founding editorial team at the  Big Issue  magazine in London and spent 15-years as a writer and associate editor at the  Guardian  newspaper. His debut novel,  The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times , was listed for the Costa First Novel Award, the Author's Club Award, the Desmond...

Lynne Peeples is a freelance science journalist, specialising in the environment, public health and medicine. She holds a M.S. in Biostatistics from Harvard and an M.A. in Science Journalism from New York University. Her writing has appeared in  Huffington Post, Nature, Scientific American and The Atlantic , amongst others. A 2020-2021 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow and a finalist for t...