Little Atoms

From back in September 2021, Neil talks to Lauren Groff about her novel Matrix. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First broadcast in January 2023, Bret Easton Ellis talks to Neil about his novel The Shards. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From March 2023, Neil talks to Alice Winn about her novel In Memoriam, which won the Waterstones Novel of the Year award, and the British Book Awards Debut of the Year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neil Denny talks to Adrian Chiles about his book The Good Drinker, from November 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ann Patchett is the author of novels, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize in the U.K., and the National Humanities Medal. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Whistler. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, won the Booker Prize and both 'Debut of the Year' and 'Book of the Year' at the British Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction, among many other awards. His second novel, Young Mungo, was a number one Sunday Times Bestseller. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker. On this, the 1000th episode of Little Atoms, he talks to Neil Denny about his new novel John of John. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel Lavelle is an Orwell Prize-winning freelance feature writer from Manchester. His first book, Down and Out, was published in 2022 and won a Royal Society of Literature award for non-fiction writing. He has covered topics such as mental health, homelessness, and culture for the Guardian (for whom he co-authored the series ‘The Empty Doorway’), New Statesman and the Independent. He received the Guardian’s Hugo Young award for an opinion piece on his experience of homelessness. ‘The Empty Doorway’ won Feature of the Year at the British Journalism Awards 2019 and was nominated for the same award at the National Press Awards 2020. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new book Chasing Aliens: Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel Trilling writes about nationalism, migration and human rights for publications including the London Review of Books, the Guardian and the New York Times. His work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Political Book Awards and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book, If We Tolerate This: How the British establishment made the far right respectable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Fuller gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn't start writing until she was forty. She has written five previous novels including: Unsettled Ground, which in 2021 won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, Swimming Lessons, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Hunger and Thirst. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Byrne is a dramatist and journalist. He was the editor of The Wilson Quarterly from 2019 to 2021. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Time, BookForum and Zona Motel. His music criticism includes liner notes for releases by R.E.M. and Uncle Tupelo. His work as a dramatist includes two musicals: Nero/Pseudo (written with Jon Langford and Jim Elkington) and Congressman Davy (with Dean Schlabowske). His play, Hotel Mayflower, was published in a bilingual edition (English/German) by Moloko Print. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2024 Pandora Machine film, The Drowned Girl. Byrne gained notoriety recently with author Jarett Kobek for his role in recovering the plaintext for the long-unsolved K4 strand of the celebrated Kryptos cipher. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new book Beauty Doesn’t Reach Me. Content note: Discussion of suicide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Angela Tomaski was born in Oxford and raised in Somerset with her four brothers and sisters. She has had a variety of different jobs, including as a waitress, cleaner, English teacher and activity coordinator in a care home. She has a daughter and two grandsons, and now lives in rural Dorset. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel The Infamous Gilberts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sian Hughes is a writer who grew up in a small village in Cheshire. Her first collection of poetry The Missing was a Poetry Society Recommendation, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis and the Aldeburgh prizes, and won the Seamus Heaney Award. Sian's first novel Pearl was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for The Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2024. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel No Such Thing As Monday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elizabeth Arnott is an award-winning writer and journalist and has written critically acclaimed historical fiction as Lizzie Pook. Her work has featured in publications including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Stylist. On today’s episode of Little Atoms, she talks to Neil Denny about her new novel The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of four novels, including The Water Cure and Cursed Bread. She has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize, has won a Betty Trask Award, and has been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel, Permanence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Grindrod is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt (shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize for UK travel and nature writing), and Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain. He hosts the podcast Monstrosities Mon Amour. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Plunket was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1945, but raised in Havana and Mexico City. After college he moved to New York and became a writer, publishing two novels, My Search for Warren Harding (1983) and Love Junkie (1992). He later became Mr Chatterbox, the gossip columnist for Sarasota Magazine. He is retired and lives in a trailer park in Englewood, Florida. On today’s episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his novel Love Junkie which was recently re-released by penguin Modern Classics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Isabel Waidner is the author of five novels – including Sterling Karat Gold, which won the Goldsmiths Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. They teach in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms they talk to Neil Denny about their latest novel As If. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francis Spufford is the author of three novels and five works of non-fiction. His debut work of fiction was the historical novel Golden Hill, which won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for four others. His second novel, Light Perpetual, was awarded the Encore Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize. His third novel, the alternative history Cahokia Jazz, was recognised by the Science Fiction community when it was awarded the Sidewise Award in 2023. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Nonesuch. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Geary, an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists and I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about the reissue of his New York Times best-selling book The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Preston is an award-winning author of five novels including This Bleeding City, The Revelations, In Love and War and Winchelsea, as well as a book of non-fiction As Kingfishers Catch Fire. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Economist and Harper's Bazaar. He reviews books for the Observer's New Review, Financial Times and Spectator. Alex is co-founder of the Corfu Literary Festival and Patron of Oxford Literary Festival. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel A Stranger in Corfu. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Originally from Leicester, Manish Chauhan works as a finance lawyer and currently lives in East London. His short story, "Pieces", was shortlisted for the 2024 BBC National Short Story Award. His work has been shortlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize and the Exeter Short Story Competition. Early excerpts of Belgrave Road were longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Award and shortlisted for the Daniel Goldsmith First Novel Prize. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about Belgrave Road, his debut novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, and five collections of stories including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama has one of his ten favourite books of 2021). Three of Saunders' books - Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo - were chosen for the New York Times' list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Vigil. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Grace Murray was born in 2003 and grew up in Norwich. She has recently graduated from Edinburgh University, where she read English Literature and found time to write between her studies and two part-time jobs. Her short fiction has been published in The London Magazine. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil denny about her debut novel Blank Canvas, which was written over the course of a year as part of WriteNow, Penguin Random House’s flagship mentorship scheme for emerging talent. Grace won one of nine places on the scheme on the exceptional strength of her writing, selected from a pool of over 1,300 applicants. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniyal Mueenuddin graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School. After winning a Fulbright scholarship to study in Norway, he practiced law in New York before returning to Khânpur, Pakistan to manage the family farm. He divides his time between Oslo and Pakistan. Stories in his collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and Salman Rushdie's Best American Short Story collection. 'Our Lady of Paris' was nominated for a National Magazine Award. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new novel This Is Where The Serpent Lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sebastian Faulks has written nineteen books, of which A Week in December and The Fatal Englishman were number one in the Sunday Times bestseller lists. He is best known for Birdsong, part of his French trilogy, and Human Traces, the first in an ongoing Austrian trilogy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a journalist on national papers. He has also written screenplays and has appeared in small roles on stage. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jarett Kobek is an internationally bestselling Turkish-American writer living in California. His previous books have been translated into eleven languages and include ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, and Motor Spirit. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Invocation Of My Demon Brother, which is published by DieDieBooks and is available here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miriam Robinson is an author who has worked in the world of books and bookshops for over 15 years. Previously the host of podcast My Unlived Life, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London and her short fiction has been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize, the inaugural Pindrop/RA Short Story Prize and the Pat Kavanagh Prize. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel And Notre Dame is Burning. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Sidebottom teaches classical history at Oxford University, and is the bestselling author of fifteen novels. His debut trade non-fiction book, The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome, was published in 2022 and was a Book of the Year in the Spectator, the Financial Times and BBC History. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Those Who Are About To Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ziyad Marar is a publisher and author of The Happiness Paradox , Deception, Intimacy and Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book, Noticing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Graham Robb was born in Manchester in 1958 and is a former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He has published widely on French literature and history. His book The Discovery of France won both the Duff Cooper and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prizes. For Parisians the City of Paris awarded him the Grande Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He lives on the English-Scottish border. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book The Discovery of Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and Guardian US, and she is a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship. On this episode of Little Atoms, Joanna talks to Neil Denny about her latest book Greyhound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Rebanks is a farmer and writer based in the Lake District. His No. 1 bestselling debut, The Shepherd’s Life, was translated into sixteen languages. His second book, English Pastoral, was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. On this episode of Little Atoms, James talks to Neil Denny about his latest book The Place of Tides. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. On this episode of Little Atoms, Mary talks to Neil Denny about her latest book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas McMullan lives and works in London. His debut novel, The Last Good Man, won the 2021 Betty Trask Prize. His short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, The Dublin Review, Granta, 3:AM Magazine, Lighthouse and Best British Short Stories, and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, frieze, ArtReview and BBC News. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Groundwater. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award. Enlightenment was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and her other work has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first full length work of non-fiction Death of an Ordinary Man. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of two novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her new Booker Prize Shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and Stone Blind. Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth, Pandora’s Jar, was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. She has written and performed eleven series of her BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015 she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel No Friend To This House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patrick Ryan's short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, LitHub, Refinery 29 and Electric Literature, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. His debut collection of linked short stories, Send Me, was chosen for Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers program. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the anthology Tales of Two Cities, and elsewhere. The former associate editor of Granta, he is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new novel Buckeye. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest work of non-fiction A Truce That Is not Peace. Note: Contains discussion of suicide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of Wise Men, The Inseparables, Rooms for Vanishing and a story collection, The Book of Life. His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Rooms For Vanishing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since Laura Lippman's debut, she has been recognised as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her "special, even extraordinary," and Gillian Flynn wrote, "She is simply a brilliant novelist." Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. On this episode of Little Atoms, Laura talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Murder Takes a Vacation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London. On this episode of Little Atoms, he talks to Neil Denny about Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World, his first book for which he was the recipient of the 2023 RSL Giles St Aubyn Award, awarded for debut works of non-fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She was educated in the US and now lives in London. Her first novel Golden Child won multiple prizes and was named one of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World’. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her Booker Prize long listed new novel Love Forms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. His previous books on the history of drugs include High Society, Mescaline and Psychonauts. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and former editor of Medical Humanities, a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Undark. She has previously appeared on Little Atoms talking about her books Death’s Summer Coat and Mr. Humble & Dr Butcher, and on this episode she talks to Neil Denny about her latest book The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wendy Erskine is the author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers' Choice Award. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel The Benefactors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David's first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looked at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future. It was published in March 2020 with both The Times and The Telegraph naming it a book of the year. Its fans include Robert Macfarlane and Margaret Atwood, and it has been translated into nine other languages. He has had pieces published in The Atlantic, BBC Future, Emergence, Prospect, Daily Telegraph, Orion, and Washington Post. He has spoken at numerous online events, has given an invited lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, and has appeared on radio and podcasts such as BBC Free Thinking and Little Atoms. On this week’s episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marie Rutkoski is a New York Times bestselling author of several novels for children and young adults. She grew up in Illinois as the oldest of four children, and has lived in Moscow, Prague, and Paris. She holds degrees from the University of Iowa and Harvard University, and is now a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College, where she teaches Shakespeare, children's literature, and fiction writing. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel for an adult audience, Ordinary Love. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his debut novel Saraswati. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. Her debut novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life was longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Award. She is also the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Her writing is published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. Nell is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel The Original. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.