Little Atoms

Donal Ryan is an award-winning author from Nenagh, County Tipperary, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted 'Irish Book of the Decade'. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his most recent novel The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Heart Be At Peace.

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work pushes the boundaries of form, language and ideas. Her novel, Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards. Her journalism has been featured in The New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. She has also judged various literary prizes including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award. She was a judge for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. She is the director and founder of Black to the Future festival. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Curandera.

Shahnaz Habib is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. She translates from her mother tongue, the south Indian language of Malayalam, and has translated two novels, Jasmine Days, winner of the 2018 JCB Prize, and Al Arabian Novel Factory. Airplane Mode, her first book, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence.

Harriet Constable is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker living in London. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, the Economist, and the BBC, and she is a grantee of the Pulitzer Center. Raised in a musical family, The Instrumentalist is her first novel. It has been selected as one of the Top 10 Debuts of 2024 by the Guardian.

James Shapiro, who teaches English at Columbia University in New York, is author of several books, including 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (winner of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006 and the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' in 2023), as well as Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?  On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about The Playbook: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War.

Clare Beams is the author of the novel The Illness Lesson, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize,and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel The Garden.

Ralf Webb is the author of Rotten Days in Late Summer, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Fantastic Man, Granta, the Guardian and the London Review of Books. He tutors in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny abouth his first nonfiction book Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America.

Adam Higginbotham is a British writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ and Smithsonian. He is the author of Midnight In Chernobyl, and in today's episode of Little Atoms, he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.