Sir Kazuo Ishiguro knows how to command a room, even when that room is Oxford’s imposing Sheldonian Theatre brimming with an audience in attendance to celebrate his life and work.
Students exercised by decolonisation show us a new way of opening out English studies Elleke Boehmer This piece was first published in the Times Higher Education supplement, 2 May 2019, pp. 42–3.Read More…
Why Reni-Eddo Lodge is inspiring me to keep talking about race Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, January 2019 Something special happened in Oxford on a warm day in June 2018. Reni Eddo-Lodge was inRead More…
Close reading of Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black Chelsea Haith The following extract is taken from pp. 86–88, Chapter 5, “Welcome to the Fold”, of Some Kind of Black (Little, Brown, 1996). NoRead More…
For Sarah Howe, the English-speaking daughter of an orphaned Chinese mother, the themes of motherhood and mother tongue are inextricably linked.
In literary studies, we tend to think of cultural forms (poems/plays/novels) as imaginatively conjured containers for a particular writer’s plot and characters…
Reviewers often position Mimi Khalvati as a ‘Persian poet’ due to her inclusion of Persian imagery, form, and the occasional line of Farsi in her poetry.
‘My first book is about the loss of a twin, what happens beyond that loss’, says Diana Evans in a 2018 BBC radio interview.
The heart of Nadeem Aslam’s third novel, The Wasted Vigil (2008), echoes John Berger’s often quoted claim (excerpted from his Booker-winning novel G.): ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’.
Caleb Femi’s work compels his audience to move away from a modern dependence on the written word…