George RR Martin has opened up about experiencing depression during a “stressful” and “overwhelming” year, as readers continue to await the long-delayed sixth instalment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series. The 77-year-old American author, whose fantasy novels shaped and inspired the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, wrote candidly about his…
It should be some kind of happy ending when, after years of poverty and graft, an aspiring writer publishes their debut novel and it is greeted with acclaim and awards – but that’s not how it happened for Michael Thomas. His 2006 novel Man Gone Down seemed to augur the arrival of a powerful new…
Like many of the wise women in her books, Sharon Blackie lives miles from anyone. Hers is the only house on the road winding through a valley deep in the Yorkshire Dales. The River Eden runs along the bottom of her garden, which overlooks the ruins of a castle built, as legend has it, by King Arthur’s…
The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold….
Shahrnush Parsipur, the celebrated Iranian writer whose subversive works of feminist fiction saw her repeatedly imprisoned, has died aged 80. A pioneer of women’s literature in Iran, Parsipur excoriated the country’s patriarchal culture in novels including Women Without Men and Touba and the Meaning of Night. She was imprisoned four times, under the Shah and…
Maureen Duffy, author of more than 60 works and a pioneering activist for gay rights and writers’ rights, has died at the age of 92. Duffy was awarded the inaugural £10,000 Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Pioneer prize last year by Bernardine Evaristo, who described her as a “true trailblazer in every sense of the…
On a stretch of Manchester road known for kebabs, shisha smoke and restless energy, three young men drive towards a night that already feels like it’s slipping out of control. The premise of Wimmy Road Boyz, the debut novel by #Merky books new writers’ prize winner Sufiyaan Salam, is deceptively simple: “three boyz drive and…
A few weeks after the German publication of his debut novel in 2024, author Matthias Jügler received a call from an employee at the German government agency tasked with investigating the human rights abuses of the socialist east. The call wasn’t overtly threatening; Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for…
David Malouf, the acclaimed Australian author of books including Ransom, An Imaginary Life and the Booker prize-nominated Remembering Babylon, has died aged 92. Malouf died on Wednesday, his publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, said in a statement on Thursday. “We are deeply saddened to share that author and poet David Malouf AO has passed away,”…
Shorouk Express Arian Leka in many ways is a peculiar phenomenon in the literary landscape of the Balkans and Europe as a whole. With his poems, short stories, essays and novels, he explores the idea of migration and exile in a thorough and coherent manner, with a particular focus on the Albanian experience, reflecting on…
