Eastern promises – the rediscovery of Stefan Heym
A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly...
View ArticleSimin Daneshvar, Persia’s first female novelist and hope for Iran’s future
There is a Persian proverb which states that ‘books are a man’s best friend.’ Persian literature from the kings of antiquity to the last Shah of the Peacock Throne has, for the most part, been...
View ArticleAn unwanted relation
In June 1981, the United States’ Centers for Disease Control noted in its weekly report that five ‘previously healthy’ young men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumonia. Two of them had died....
View ArticleTan Twan Eng interview: ‘I have no alternative but to write in English’
Tan Twan Eng’s first novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, his second was shortlisted and then won the Man Asian Literary Prize. To say that his work over the past five years has received...
View ArticleBen Fountain interview: Lies are an affront to writers because lying is the...
Ben Fountain’s debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published in America eighteen years after he left his job at a Dallas real estate law firm to become a writer. It...
View ArticleXiaolu Guo interview: ‘Westerners have to read more non-western materials’
Born in a remote fishing village in south eastern China during the Cultural Revolution, Xiaolu Guo is now known as an artistic ‘one-woman industry’. Producing both films and novels, her work has made...
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