United Kingdom
Author of This Way to Departures, Above Sugar Hill and Risk. Words in Granta, The Nation, Sight & Sound, Catapult Story, 3:AM Magazine, and Hotel. Audio on BBC Witness, KCRW Berlin, and Why Why Why: The Books Podcast.
A visitor wanted to know about the upcoming elections here: How would concerns about migration affect the outcome? They wouldn't, his host replied, because migration wasn't an issue in the elections. Germany, a country with the third-largest population of refugees in the world, will hold general elections on September 26 to decide who will succeed Angela Merkel.
The news from Nicaragua is bad. More than 30 opposition figures were arrested in June-a crackdown designed to nullify any resistance ahead of the November presidential elections. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo had long ago left behind their roles as leaders of a revolutionary movement, and even former allies were now targets.
When I read the description of Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (Ostatni Etap in Polish), I couldn’t quite believe it: a feature film, set in Auschwitz-Birkenau, filmed on the grounds of the former concentration camp in 1947, written and directed by former prisoners...
West Germany became home to between 15-20 million American soldiers and their families as well as civilian employees during the Cold War. And some stayed when their posting was over. We spoke to three such former GI's about what brought them here and then brought them back again for good...
During WWII, Britain deported some civilians classed as 'enemy aliens' to Australia.
I wheel my suitcase through Southern Cross Station in Melbourne in April 2016, passing the electronic ticket machines and sushi stands. I am on my way to a place that my father traveled to more than seventy-five years before, when he was a detainee sent to Australia by the British government.
I used to joke that Miami was the kind of place where, even if you weren't a writer of crime fiction, you wound up writing crime fiction. I arrived there in the late 1990s. The drug wars of the 1980s were over.
There are plenty of books by writers who arrive in New York City, make it their home, and start chronicling it - amazed, amused, appalled, daunted, delighted, frustrated. And, most of all, viewing the city, to quote William Styron, as "a place as strange as Brooklyn."
The tenants at Grenfell Tower saw the danger, noted it when they walked into their building at night, and reported it - just like the tenants in the building that collapsed in Harlem more than 20 years before. And, just like the tenants in Harlem, they understood that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord."
I was co-founder and presenter of Why Why Why: The Books Podcast, which ran from November 2017 to August 2019. We asked writers why they wrote the book they wrote, editors why they published the book, and readers why they picked up the book and read it. Why Why Why was named one of “15 Excellent Bookish Podcasts Launched in 2017” by BookRiot.