After the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life
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| Marieke Lucas Rijneveld |
When Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was three years old, their 12-year-old brother was knocked over and killed by a bus as he walked to school from the family farm. Rijneveld’s response to this early confrontation with the unthinkable was not to draw a veil over it, but to build two books around it. “I think it’s unfortunate for a family to have a writer born into it,” says the 28-year-old author, serenely.
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| Han Kang |
The internationally acclaimed South Korean novelist on confronting the country’s violent history
Friday 5 February 2016
Early in 2015 a buzz began to build around a slim novel called The Vegetarian. It was about a woman who turned her face to the wall, refusing to eat meat and scandalising her friends and family, as a prelude to rejecting life itself. “It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions,” wrote its Guardian reviewer.
Wild about the garden: inside photographer Siân Davey’s sanctuary
The artist transformed a neglected patch beside her cottage, attracting a variety of visitors eager to shed their inhibitions, clothes and anxieties, and whose lives she has caught in striking images that form part of a new exhibition
The photographer Siân Davey was “navigating a family deep in crisis” when her son Luke suggested that they transform a neglected garden outside her rented cottage into a wildflower sanctuary that would draw people in. “And, without any ambition, something in me said a resounding yes,” she says. Together, they set about clearing the plot, researching local flowers and sowing them according to the rituals of a Buddhist faith they both share.
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| Samuel Beckett |
The actor talks about his new movie Dance First, in which he plays the Irish dramatist, the time he shared a drink with Richard Burton and why he had to leave Los Angeles
In 1969, Samuel Beckett and his wife learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. “Dear Sam and Suzanne,” it read. “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a “catastrophe”. Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia, leaving them with a surreal mute interview.
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| ‘I’m not somebody who finds it difficult to make work’ … Claire Keegan |
The acclaimed Irish writer on writing short works, the Magdalene Laundries and her new hobby, horse training
Claire Armitstead
Wednesday 20 October 2021
For those who know and follow her work, a new Claire Keegan book is as rare and precious as a diamond in a coalmine. There have been just four of them over 22 years, and all are small, sharp and brilliant. Fortunately for an author so sparing with her output, those who know and follow her include an international array of literary connoisseurs, and many of the children passing through the Irish school system.
