Novelist

My earliest reading memory My sister and I were obsessed with Tomi Ungerer’s The Beast of Monsieur Racine, a picture book in which two children disguise themselves as a mysterious beast and are studied by a scientist. It’s a fun story, but on each page, comical and grotesque things are happening. A nail pokes up on a slide, a pickpocket steals something from a distracted woman, a falling axe splits open a man’s head. We studied the illustrations as if we were poring over a sacred text.My favourite book growing up Now…

With notable, largely historical exceptions, literary lives can be disappointingly dull to read about. Not so Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s. Better Broken Than New is the novelist and memoirist’s first book since 2007 and its vivid, sometimes chaotic narrative details – adventures and misadventures enough for multiple lifetimes – leave the reader wondering not from where she derives her creative material but how she’s lived to tell the tale.Cheating death thanks to a premonition, cooking for a cannibal and surviving the…

N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with…

The graphic novelist Posy Simmonds has won the Grand Prix at France’s Angoulême International Comics festival – the first time a British artist and author has been awarded the world’s most prestigious prize for lifetime achievement in comics.Simmonds’s satirical observations on modern British society, interweaving detailed illustration with long literary texts, are held to have redefined the graphic novel genre.She said of the award: “I was gobsmacked – époustouflée, as you would say in French … It’s extraordinary because…

‘I knew I wanted to write about young people and money,” says Kiley Reid, recalling the moment in spring 2019 when the idea for her next book came into view. She had finished editing her debut, the much-loved Such a Fun Age, and was completing her masters degree in fiction at the University of Iowa. She began interviewing undergraduates about their relationship to money, paying them $15 for 40 minutes of their time. She asked them about their interpretation of “load-bearing” words, like “classy”, and “trashy”. One student…

The Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina did not leave the huge literary legacy that she might have done, had she been given more time. When a Russian rocket exploded in Kramatorsk on 27 June, the poet and novelist was just 37 years old. The rocket caused injuries from which she would not recover.Yet in her short life, Amelina still managed to achieve a great deal. She emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 14, but decided to return to Ukraine, to her native city of Lviv, soon after. She graduated from the Lviv…

William Faulkner is the bard of the American South. Saul Bellow is the supreme chronicler of Chicago. New York is contested territory. For a long time, Wallace Stegner could have laid claim to the West. But that was before Cormac McCarthy hit his stride. PREMIUM Cormac McCarthy, the revered and unflinching chronicler of America's bleak frontiers and grim underbellies, died on June 13, 2023, his publisher said. He was 89 years old. (AFP) To understand the American West, you need to know the land and its…

Author of The Road and No Country For Old Men died in his home of natural causes, publisher announcesCormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89 on 13 June, the American author’s publisher has announced.McCarthy died in his home of natural causes. His son John McCarthy confirmed the death. Continue reading... Author of The Road and No Country For Old Men died in his home of natural causes, publisher announcesCormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89 on 13 June, the American author’s publisher has announced.McCarthy died…

Martin Amis, the influential author of era-defining novels including Money and London Fields, and the memoir Experience, has died at the age of 73 at his home at Lake Worth in Florida . His wife, Isabel Fonseca, said that the cause was cancer of the oesophagus.Amis was among the celebrated group of novelists including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose works defined the British literary scene in the 1980s.His 1984 novel Money was named by Robert McCrum in the Guardian as among the 100 best novels written…

Chaotic conditions in Peckham: brolly-ruining wind, sudden showers, one of those afternoons when the weather apps show every symbol from sunshine to lightning and leave you to figure it out. Caleb Azumah Nelson, the 29-year-old author and artist whose prose and photographs tend to document life in south London, was meant to be showing me around today. We might have swung by the Peckhamplex cinema, the public library off Rye Lane, maybe getting as far as Morley’s burger bar to the south or Bagel King further north – all of…