“You can hypnotise an entire audience and make them feel a certain way. I think about what they’re feeling, because I’m making sure they feel a certain way. And I know when I’ve got them”
“You think you’ve got something radical to say and then two princes of the realm go and agree with you. Terrific. Thanks, lads. I’ve never claimed to have much street cred but this is the limit.”
New Statesman
“Every moment that passes is a Lost Time Accident. Close your eyes, Children, when you want to stop time...”
“I enjoyed this book enormously, even as I worried about its brave but vulnerable author, struggling to reach the good life for which her parents once went in search.”
Will Self
The Guardian
“He is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip”
“I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by sixty-seven moons”
Watch The Garden of Readin’s review of The Bones of Grace
One man’s account of rendition, torture and detention without charge at the hands of the US
‘My life as a writer was a quiet thing…’ – Yann Martel on winning the Man Booker Prize
Yann Martel
Guardian
Watch the Guardian’s exclusive animated documentary about Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir, Guantánamo Diary.
“You might not be familiar with the American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz’s name, but if you’re of a certain age, you have probably seen at least one image by him. His photograph of buffalo tumbling off a cliff was used as the cover of U2’s One, taking his art to a global audience a few months before his death in 1992 of Aids-related complications.”
Olivia Laing
Guardian
What advice would you offer to aspiring writers? – Mumsnet. ‘Read obsessively. There is no better training for writing than reading.’ – Tahmima
Read Tahmima's interview with Mumsnet
Mumsnet
Strange Loyalties (Black Thorn)
“I don’t ever remember not wanting to be a poet” – Lemn Sissay delivers an epiphany on poetry and how poetry chooses you.
BBC Radio 6 Music
“In Dirt Road we see [Kelman] continuing to show how human experience can be energised and renewed by its modest scale, not flattened by it into a stereotype. It is another masterpiece from one of our best writers.”
Kirsty Gunn
Guardian
The High Mountains of Portugal
“The moral and spiritual implications of his tale have, in the end, a quality of haunting tenderness”
Ursula K Le Guin
Guardian
“It was in the painting that I first saw myself as countless suitors had often described me. Before then, I would frown at my face in a hand-held mirror, wondering what they saw that made me so beautiful in their eyes.”
“Tattooing in prison is like trying to sew fine stitches with a knitting needle. It’s the essence of prison ingenuity – that so much can be done with so little.”
Watch Yann Martel discussing Life of Pi following its original US publication in 2002.
“I now believe that there are books with magic and without. And I much prefer them with, thank you very much.” Scarlett Thomas on Dragon’s Green
Guardian