Little Atoms

Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and Guardian US, and she is a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship. On this episode of Little Atoms, Joanna talks to Neil Denny about her latest book Greyhound.

James Rebanks is a farmer and writer based in the Lake District. His No. 1 bestselling debut, The Shepherd’s Life, was translated into sixteen languages. His second book, English Pastoral, was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. On this episode of Little Atoms, James talks to Neil Denny about his latest book The Place of Tides.

Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. On this episode of Little Atoms, Mary talks to Neil Denny about her latest book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy.

Thomas McMullan lives and works in London. His debut novel, The Last Good Man, won the 2021 Betty Trask Prize. His short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, The Dublin Review, Granta, 3:AM Magazine, Lighthouse and Best British Short Stories, and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, frieze, ArtReview and BBC News. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Groundwater.

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award. Enlightenment was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and her other work has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first full length work of non-fiction Death of an Ordinary Man.

Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of two novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her new Booker Prize Shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and Stone Blind. Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth, Pandora’s Jar, was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. She has written and performed eleven series of her BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015 she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel No Friend To This House.

Patrick Ryan's short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, LitHub, Refinery 29 and Electric Literature, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. His debut collection of linked short stories, Send Me, was chosen for Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers program. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the anthology Tales of Two Cities, and elsewhere. The former associate editor of Granta, he is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new novel Buckeye.

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest work of non-fiction A Truce That Is not Peace. Note: Contains discussion of suicide.