[ad_1] Serendipity dictated that the American writer and academic James Shapiro received the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction’s Winner of Winners award, given to celebrate its 25th year, at a ceremony in Edinburgh. In his teens and early 20s, Shapiro tells me as we talk over Zoom the morning afterContinue Reading
[ad_1] My earliest reading memoryWhen I was a child, my father, a young and poor novelist, kept our unfurnished house packed with books. A deluge spilled out from the shelves, covering the floor in disorderly towers like a secondhand bookstore where the organising had been put off for ever. ToContinue Reading
[ad_1] How do you make the life of a poet work on screen? It helps if they had scandalous personal lives (Rimbaud and Verlaine in Total Eclipse, Dylan Thomas in Last Call and The Edge of Love). Robert Graves was last seen on the sidelines of Terence Davies’s biopic asContinue Reading