Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
The first book that Tomas Venclova read in English was Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not a bad start in the language, given his future career. Venclova is less well-known in the West than his late friends Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, but he’s something like their Baltic equivalent: a dissident poet of international standing, who spent many
The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on
In this week’s Books podcast, I’m joined by the great Wendy Cope, whose new collection Anecdotal Evidence is just out. I talk to her about why she’s funniest when she’s most serious, the fascination of writing in form, the disappearance of Jake Strugnell, the recent row over whether the spoken-word work of Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest
Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at any point in human history, only a stone-cold idiot would choose any time other than the present. On average, humans are by orders of magnitude healthier, wealthier, nicer, happier, longer lived, more free and better
I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter. Since we had a truly belting shortlist for this prize, I thought
In this week’s books podcast, I’m talking to Jay Heinrichs about his new book How To Argue With A Cat: A Human’s Guide to the Art of Persuasion. Jay is one of the US’s foremost advocates of the ancient art of rhetoric — and in this book he turns it on Mr Tiddles. But he
This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that – despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at
My guest in this week’s podcast is the incomparable spy writer Mick Herron – these days, happily, a less and less well kept secret. He’s the author of the Slough House stories – funny and gripping novels about an awkward squad of failed James Bonds under the aegis of the wonderfully unspeakable Jackson Lamb. The
My guest on this week’s books podcast is the author and critic Stuart Kelly. His new book, The Minister and the Murderer: A Book of Aftermaths, tells the story of the only convicted murderer ever to become a minister of the Church of Scotland. We talk about the Ten Commandments, faith and doubt, Stuart’s experiences of
There’s a tiny mistake in Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays. She describes Geoff Dyer’s unimprovably funny ‘trick while introducing an unsmiling J.M. Coetzee at a literary festival’. And it’s a suggestive mistake. The moment she refers to is Dyer, bashful, blurting that he wondered how his younger self would have reacted if he’d one
In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the award-festooned writer Mohsin Hamid about his latest novel Exit West — touching on the effects of technology, the migrant crisis, political writing and why his eight-year-old daughter is shaping up to be an emo kid. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like
This week’s books podcast celebrates the centenary of Muriel Spark. I’m joined by Alan Taylor (author of a new memoir of his friendship with Spark, Appointment in Arezzo) and the critic Philip Hensher to talk about Spark’s life, legacy, special strengths as a novelist — and the mystique that continues to surround the Scottish-born, Tuscan-dwelling author
It LIVES! This week’s books podcast honours the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein. To cut through all those high camp, bolt-through-the-neck film versions clouding our collective memory, I’m joined by the poet and critic Fiona Sampson, whose fine new book In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (reviewed in this week’s
In this week’s Spectator Books podcast — arranged in partnership with the male suicide prevention charity CALM — I talk to Johann Hari about his controversial new book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions. In it, Hari argues that the psychiatric establishment overprescribes chemical antidepressants, and that the
John Murray – the publisher of Byron, Goethe, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin, inter alia – turns 250 this year. This week, they’re launching – in association with The Spectator (a stripling at 190-odd) – a new international prize for non-fiction. Entrants, who must be previously unpublished in book form, are invited to submit an
This week’s Books Podcast — the last before the Christmas break — sees the Spectator’s office flooded with elves. The QI Elves, to be precise. Four of these adorable, trivia-mining creatures — hosts of the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast — join me to look back over some of the more arcane details
In this week’s Spectator Books Podcast, I’m talking to Russia’s most prominent dissident journalist, Masha Gessen, about her National Book Award-winning new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In the book, which she calls a “non-fiction novel”, Masha attempts to give a properly rounded sense — from high politics to the everyday lives
This week in the books podcast I’m talking to Richard Flanagan, the Man Booker prize winning author of Gould’s Book of Fish and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about his new novel First Person.Drawing on Richard’s own experience of working as the ghostwriter for a celebrated con-man, First Person tells the story of a struggling young literary writer brought
My guest this week is the comedienne and writer Viv Groskop, and our subject is the greats of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature. In her new book The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Viv tells us (among other things) how Dostoyevsky can calm you down, how Anna Akhmatova can cheer you up and how
Last night saw the award of this year’s £30,000 Baillie Gifford Prize – the country’s most respected prize for non-fiction – to David France’s How To Survive A Plague (Picador). You can read Peter Tatchell’s Spectator review of this account of the ‘plague years’ of the Aids crisis, and the extraordinary work that activists did
