London Review Bookshop Podcast

Choirboy, drag act, grandson, mentor, poet, lover, activist, performer: Dean Atta has played many roles in his life. In his explosive, candid and courageous memoir Person Unlimited (Canongate) he describes a life lived in defiance of categories. Benjamin Zephaniah wrote of Atta’s work as being ‘As honest as truth itself. He follows no trend; he seeks no favours . . . Beyond black, beyond white, beyond straight, beyond gay, so I say. Love your eyes over these words of truth. You will be uplifted’. Dean Atta reads from his work and talks about it with writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen.

In The Future of Songwriting, lead singer with Throwing Muses, solo artist and songwriter Kristin Hersh reflects on the status and future of her chosen genre over a long, hot Christmas in Australia. In a series of conversations, encounters and philosophical dialogues Hersh delivers a fierce, funny and existential meditation on the art of the song - and its future. She was joined at the Bookshop by writer and critic Jennifer Hodgson.Get the book: https://lrb.me/kristinhershpodFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

In her debut novel Amma (Weatherglass), a multi-generational saga set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and London, Saraid de Silva explores memory, trauma and displacement. She was in conversation with Nina Mingya Powles, author of Tiny Moons and Small Bodies of Water.

Siblings (Monitor Books) is a unique round-table discussion / poetry collection, convened by Will Harris, between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Nisha Ramayya. The four poets explore real and imaginary siblings, writing communities, and the wayward directions of the lyric mode – writing as makers and friends about the possibilities that poetry enables now. All four poets convened at the Bookshop for discussion and readings.Get the book: https://lrb.me/siblingsbookFind more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

When Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work was published shortly before the author’s death in 1995, Marina Warner wrote in the LRB: ‘This small book contains multitudes. It fits to the hand like one of those knobbed hoops that do concise duty for the rosary, each knob giving the mind pause to open up to vistas of meditation on mysteries and passion.’To mark the publication of a new edition (Penguin Modern Classics) with an introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones, we host a discussion of Rose’s ‘masterpiece of the autobiographer’s art’ (Edward Said) and its legacy, featuring LRB contributing editor James Butler, Rebekah Howes of the University of Winchester and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

1917: Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.1930: Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman's cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.1941: Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers' retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming 'a writer again'.Harriet Baker describes in Rural Hours (Allen Lane) how three very different writers, more often associated with city living, found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. She was in conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse and translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables.

Lauren Oyler is one of our rowdiest and sharpest literary critics, twice causing the LRB website to crash from too much traffic, and author of the novel Fake Accounts. No Judgement is her first collection of non-fiction; a series of interlinked essays connecting internet gossip, the attention economy, and the role of criticism.Oyler is in conversation with journalist and cultural commentator Leo Robson.

Three of Wales' best contemporary writers in an early St David's Day celebration of Wales in words. Novelist Joe Dunthorne, National Poet of Wales Hanan Issa and Carnegie prize-winning novelist and playwright Manon Steffan Ros explore the country's literary history, share its less-known treasures, and discuss the meaning of 'Welshness' today, in a one-off conversation with readings. The event was curated by Hay Festival as part of Wales Week in London.

Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua, Pasolini, Pussy Riot and the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. Eberstadt was joined at the Bookshop by critic and novelist Olivia Laing, whose latest book The Garden Against Time (Picador) is forthcoming in May 2024.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://lrb.me/biteyourfriendsbook