memoir

R SUKUMAR Books on Gaza, the global economy, space exploration, Twitter, surrealist art, Nepal’s feminist history, and memoirs that touch on caste prejudice and human trafficking all feature in the HT Editors’ collective list of great reads of the year. (Monica Gupta) A tale of survival that’s also an appreciation of life: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (HT PHOTO) About humankind and the wild and how one interacts with and shapes the other Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click…

Errollyn Wallen is the composer of 22 operas, and counting, as well as numerous concertos, symphonies, song cycles and chamber works. Her music has been performed at major public celebrations such as the late Queen’s golden and diamond jubilees and the 2012 Paralympic Games. In 2022, she was in the top 20 most performed living composers worldwide. Her first orchestral commission, a concerto for percussion and orchestra, was performed at the Proms in 1998. This was, as she notes modestly in a footnote in her new book, the…

A memoir by Beyoncé Knowles’ father Mathew Knowles is to become a feature film, detailing his early years as a student activist.According to a report in Variety, Knowles’ 2017 book Racism from the Eyes of a Child is in active development as a film, with plans for a TV series as well. The book covers Knowles’ childhood in pre-civil rights Alabama, during which he has said he attended “all-white” high schools and universities: “I had been beaten, I’ve been electrically prodded, I’ve been spit on, I’ve been humiliated, all…

Racism: From the Eyes of a Child will be developed into a film and limited series by Say Unkel Entertainment, Variety reports As Beyoncé continues to relish in the success of Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, her dad is also entering his film era. On Tuesday, the businessman announced that he inked a deal with production company Say Unkel Entertainment to adapt his memoir Racism From the Eyes of a Child into both a film and a limited series, per Variety. The first half of Knowles’ memoir will be…

The feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot will serve as the subjects of a forthcoming limited series currently in development at STX Entertainment. The scripted series will be based on the upcoming memoir from founder Nadya Tolokonnikova, which traces the group’s origin story and subsequent run-ins with the law. “I was a broke 20-year-old artist studying philosophy, he was one of the most powerful, wealthy and dangerous men on Earth. In 2011 I went against him, damn the consequences,” Tolokonnikova said in a…

The Woman In Me by Britney Spears is one of those celebrity memoirs you think you have read without actually reading it — thanks to the bombshell revelations which made headlines days before the memoir even hit the shelves. To that end, The Woman in Me doesn’t disappoint. In the initial chapters, Spears uses her razor sharp memory to construct the Spears family tree, starting with her great grandmother down to her brother Bryan and sister Jamie Lynn. She also mentions that her paternal grandma Jean was institutionalised…

In 2006 Wayne Rooney, then a 20-year-old Manchester United forward, signed a £5m deal for five autobiographies to be published over the next 12 years. But two books never surfaced; instead we got kiss-and-tell memoirs from Helen Wood and Jenny Thompson, whose company he bought while his wife, Coleen, was pregnant with their first child, Kai, now a record-breaking goalscorer in United’s youth academy. Her new book skimps on none of that, even if its headline attraction is naturally last year’s legal tussle with Rebekah…

“We only went to Kenya because a Nairobi businessman fumbled in his jacket pocket.” So begins Nicholas Rankin’s hybrid of history and memoir focused on the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. The businessman’s car keys “snagged the trigger of his Beretta, and he shot himself in the stomach. My father got his job.”Historians don’t write history, they curate it, and in Trapped in History Rankin challenges his own childhood absorption of propagandistic accounts of Britain’s imperial past. Nearly 70 years after his arrival in…

A voice like Barbra Streisand’s is a mystery, even to its owner: two bits of gristle in the throat resonantly swell in her head and chest to produce a storm of sound that Streisand first heard when vocalising in the stairwell of a Brooklyn tenement. Taken to a recording studio by her mother at the age of 14, she gratuitously riffed on a melody and, as she recalls, “something came out of my mouth that completely surprised me”. A decade later in Funny Girl, that finely tuned and amped-up “something” stunned the world. At…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeIt hasn’t even been on shelves a full month yet and already Britney Spears’s best-selling memoir, The Woman in Me, is in talks to be turned into a screen adaptation.The bombshell memoir, which was released on 24 October, contains a number of candid revelations about the 41-year-old “Toxic” singer’s personal life – including her relationship with Justin Timberlake and the battle for…