Ruth

...More than the Japanese, the men of the subcontinent proclaimed the richness of their spiritual heritage, and the delegates included Buddhists, Jains, theosophists, the most orthodox of Brahmins, Brahmos, and of course Vivekananda. At the Parliament, they hid their divisions to stand together. Christians, and especially missionaries, were the common enemy, traducing eastern religions as “those barren, vague, meaningless abstractions in which men babble nothing under the name of the infinite.” ...The South Asians…

As you prepare to be in India to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival, what are some of the thoughts running through your mind? Have you been to Jaipur, or other parts of India before? I am very excited! I have never been to Jaipur, but so many friends have told me about how beautiful it is. When I was a college student, I spent a year travelling through Asia. This included several months in India, visiting Calcutta, Varanasi, Agra, and Delhi. I was 19 years old then, so this was a very long time ago but I have never…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeKate Winslet has revealed why she felt it was “really important” for I Am Ruth to be set in “a middle-class world”.Winslet stars as concerned mother Ruth, in Channel 4’s newest instalment of director Dominic Savage’s I Am anthology series, whose daughter Freya slowly retreats into herself as the pressures of social media begin to weigh on her.Freya’s played by Winslet’s real-life…

In the Jim Crow South of the 1930s and ‘40s, in poor, rural Georgia, forbidden love struggles up through the briars. The teens, Bayou and Leanne, find they can be together only in the dead of night, signaling each other with paper planes. The message received, they head for their spot — a tree away from prying eyes.“You are the song that I long to hear once more / You are the light that I keep looking for,” sings a velvety young female voice after the story’s over: “And I’ll spend my lifetime / Sending paper airplanes to…

The bare bones of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel sound a little unprepossessing: it begins shortly before the first world war with a young boy, James Ramsay, asking his parents if they can visit the lighthouse near the family’s summer house on the Isle of Skye, after which a discussion about the weather ensues. It goes on to chronicle a day in the life of the Ramsay parents, their eight children and their gaggle of house guests, who include a young artist, Lily Briscoe, who is painting Mrs Ramsay’s portrait; a prickly young…

Image: Warner Bros.Jurnee Smollett teases the future of her Black Canary movie. Could there be an all-women-starring Fast & Furious on the way? There is, somehow, a return for Sausage Party on the cards. Plus, more looks at the next The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror special.Spoilers now!Untitled Fast & Furious SpinoffDuring a recent interview with Business Insider, producer Donna Langely revealed she’s interested in bankrolling a Fast & Furious spinoff with an all-female cast. I would love to see a female…

The first thing the Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki did the morning after winning the Women’s prize for fiction was meditate. “A very short one,” she says when we meet at her hotel later. She was so convinced she wasn’t going to win (Meg Mason and Elif Shafak were the frontrunners) she had planned “a full schedule” for the day. “Not that I’m complaining,” she laughs. Coolly elegant in black, despite the heatwave, the 66-year-old writer has the sort of glow not often seen in post-award ceremony interviews.Ozeki can…

Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, has won the Women’s prize for fiction.The novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest takes the £30,000 award for a book that “stood out for its sparkling writing, warmth, intelligence, humour and poignancy”, according to chair of judges Mary Ann Sieghart. Photograph: Canongate/PAThe Book of Form and Emptiness is about 14-year-old Benny Oh, who begins to hear voices belonging to the things in his house after the death of his father. When his mother develops a…

As a young woman, Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway established a theory about the problem of knowing other people. In each interaction we have, she believed, some trace of who we are is left behind; and so to know someone, “one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places”. Perhaps we should consider their encounters with culture, too: which aspects of themselves they find (and therefore we find) within works of art, music, literature.Pen, the teenage protagonist of Emilie Pine’s debut novel, Ruth &…

The year 2019 didn’t want for sparky essay collections that interrogated the female experience, with Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino and Rachel Cusk all publishing new work. Even so, Emilie Pine’s bestselling Notes to Self stood out. Initially released by a small, independent Irish press before being scooped up by Hamish Hamilton, the Dublin academic’s mainstream debut brought unusual clarity and compassion to bear on sources of resonant personal pain including miscarriage, rape and life as the daughter of an alcoholic…