Interviewing a translator is one of the quiet pleasures of literary work: you pull back the curtain on decisions most readers never see, and you learn how meaning migrates between languages. Over the years I’ve interviewed translators for Storyscoutes Co and for other projects, and I’ve come to...
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Deep Reads
It begins, often, with a fragment: a single sheet of paper, a smudged date in...
Reading Guides
I love setting myself a small, intense reading mission: seven days, one region,...
Reading Guides
I often find that the first barrier to reading translated poetry is not the...
New Voices
I often find the most thrilling reading discoveries not on bestseller lists but...
I often find that the first barrier to reading translated poetry is not the language itself but a hesitation: will I be reading the poet, the translator, or both? Over the years I’ve learned that the best way into translated poetry is to lean into...
I often find the most thrilling reading discoveries not on bestseller lists but tucked into slim volumes, unusual covers and back-catalogues from independent publishers who keep faith with experiments, marginal voices and editorial risk-taking. If...
I build reading lists the way I pack a small bag for a trip: with attention to mood, a hunger for surprise and a soft refusal to overplan. Rainy weekends and quiet afternoons call for lists that feel like companions—books that suit the rhythm of...
When I think about building a reading guide, I usually start with a single stubborn image or idea that keeps returning to me long after I close a book. A motif — an object, a colour, a weather pattern, a mode of speech — can be a far richer...
When I sit down to interview a writer, I’m not only listening for a soundbite or a publicity quote; I’m tracing a map. That map shows the routes between books, the hidden corners of a writer’s bookshelf, the older texts that taught them craft...
When I first started rooting through the secondhand shelves of a tiny bookshop in Brighton, I kept finding the same thing: novels with dust jackets browned at the edges, author names I recognised from footnotes or literary histories, and blurbs that...
There are books that show you a historical date, a set of facts and figures. Then there are novels that make history feel like a living room you can enter — the creak of a floorboard, the smell of cooking, the small, embarrassing, humane gestures...
I remember the first time I opened a restored edition of a book I had already read in a cheaper paperback: the pages felt like someone had taken a curtain aside and shown me a room I thought I’d known. Restored and annotated editions do something...
I love the little thrill that comes when a book you thought you knew finds a surprising echo in something new. Pairing a neglected classic with a contemporary counterpart is one of my favourite reading games: it sharpens attention, reveals...
I remember the first time a debut novel by a writer from an underrepresented background stopped me mid-page and made me reorder my reading list. It wasn’t just the novelty of a voice I hadn’t heard before; it was the way the book treated time,...