Jenni Fagan / “Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope’

Jenni Fagan

The 

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Jenni Fagan: ‘Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope’

The Scottish author on loving The Hobbit, fairytales, Frankenstein and the shock of A Clockwork Orange

Jenni Fagan

10 July 2026

My earliest reading memory
Fairytales. I was obsessed. I took fairytales very seriously as moral lessons. I soon knew that I’d always help any old lady cross the road, it really is always best to do so.

My favourite book growing up
The Hobbit was my favourite book while growing up. It expanded my understanding of what could be achieved in fiction. I found JRR Tolkien’s world transformative. I felt as if I knew the hobbits, and I so wanted to see the elves. I could hear the crack of fireworks as they turned into dragons that flew overhead.

The writer who changed my mind
Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope. No matter how painful or difficult it was. Her work has such dignity and light. I read all of her work for years and took as many lessons from it as I could. It made me want to step up and continue to try to find a way to create a life that mattered to me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I was reading the dictionary when I was really quite little; if I found a word I didn’t know I would always go and look it up. Strange thing for a kid to do but I fell in love with language itself.

The book I came back to
I originally found Frankenstein by Mary Shelley too claustrophobic. In recent years I have connected with Shelley in a profound way and I am now writing a modern adaptation of Frankenstein that will be published next year. She was so ahead of her time, she began sci-fi, brought to life such a powerful archetype in the Creature, and while you can see inspirations of, say, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – he used to visit and read it at her father’s house – it was an absolutely personal calling for her to write this story. I am fascinated by her engagement with gnosis, the life force, death and how all the tragedies of her young life were carefully woven together by a formidable intellect. Shelley was only a teenager when she first wrote the book; interestingly, she revisited it and made revisions over decades. Like a master painter, perhaps, who adds a touch of shade and light later on, only to heighten a work’s immortal glow.

The book I reread
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is one of my favourite stories of all time. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as an Ungeziefer, some kind of monstrous creature. I think it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between the individual and social structures.

The book I could never read again
Anything by Enid Blyton. Her work has not aged well.

The book I discovered later in life
When I was travelling in Egypt I read The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany and Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz. Both books are intertwined with my memories of staying in downtown Cairo.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess when I was 15 and living in a children’s home. Its protagonist, Alex, was the same age as me. I found the book shocking. The use of “nadsat” (teenage slang) as the language spoken by his “droogs” also showed me that there are many ways to innovate in a novel.

The book I am currently reading
Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir A Hymn to Life. I think she is extraordinary and inspiring.

My comfort read
Poetry: a single stanza in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, or The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop, or Temptation by Nina Cassian. There are so many poems I return to endlessly, as with a favourite record that never fails to contain something familiar and new at the same time.

 The Delusions by Jenni Fagan is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm

 

esenta todo lo ominoso de las damas de hierro.

Monika Fagerholm

Photo by ULLA MONTAN

WHO KILLED BAMBI?

by monika Fagerholm

Translated by bradley  harmon

LET’S START HERE. One morning, September 2014.

            Gusten Grippe is walking down to the waterfront. Kallsjön, Villastan: it’s been a long time since he’s come down here on his own. A few years ago he moved away from the suburb where he grew up and vowed to never come back. So what’s he doing here now, on this specific September morning at the beginning of a fall that’ll throw him back to what he’d once left behind? The right answer: nothing. No reason, no mission. He just sort of ended up here on a morning jog. Yes, sometimes he still goes running here in Villastan, drives out from the nearby suburb where he currently lives, extravagantly, in a swanky bachelor pad with two floors (this here Gusten is a real estate agent, the realtor from hell as they say, his nickname, because he’s that good). Perhaps it’s an omen, a sign, something from the sixth sense. Most likely just a coincidence, an ironic fluke.

India’s timeless spiritual journey

Devotees releasing glowing plates of offerings into the Ganges at night, reflecting a timeless act of faith and reverence

India’s timeless spiritual journey

A look at ashrams, sacred sites, and soulful traditions

Nihel bchini

8 JULY 2026

India has long been revered as the spiritual heart of the world—a land where ancient wisdom, living traditions, and mystical practices continue to flourish. From the sacred banks of the Ganges to the quiet solitude of Himalayan ashrams, the country offers a deeply transformative journey into the essence of spirituality.

 

A colorful sign stands prominently in front of the historic Convento de San Bernardino de Siena, showcasing the picturesque town that captivates visitors with its riotously colorful streets and rich history

Not your average pitstop: Valladolid, Mexico

Hidden depths and ancient wonders in the heart of Yucatan

Shruti Kunke

8 July 2026

Winter months of 2025. As the virus of the season went around town wreaking havoc in Toronto, there was another contagion spreading faster and wider – the Cancun fever. Every single person I know was going there between February and April. 

Tony Bechara / An artist of many worlds

Tony Bechara, Untitled (detail), 1969. Courtesy of Parrish Art Museum

Tony Bechara: an artist of many worlds

27 Jun — 1 Nov 2026 at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, United States

30 JUNE 2026

 

My work is about the experience of vision, prior to the interpretation of a specific image—I am interested in that early reaction to light as it becomes cognitive. Painting is a vehicle of light and vision first, and then symbolic and narrative.

(Tony Bechara, 2001)

Mónica Ojeda / A Life Less Governed by Death

 

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda. Translated by Sarah Booker. Coffee House Press, 2026. 240 pages.

A Life Less Governed by Death

Ecuadoran author Mónica Ojeda’s new novel is a celebration of the transfiguring power of dance, music, and neo-shamanistic knowledge.

Cory Oldweiler

26 May 2026

EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Yale Review ran an essay by Aria Aber, in which the German-born author reflects on her bygone clubbing days in Berlin. One of several framing devices Aber uses to consider her time in the city’s underground party scene is “the difference between ‘day knowledge’ and ‘night knowledge,’” with the latter being that “feeling of [her] mind: altered, wounded, almost unbearably alive.” I never was part of the techno scene, but in college and, to a lesser degree, in grad school, live music in small bars or clubs was a huge part of my life, and a number of Aber’s themes resonated with me, particularly her observations on how music and dance can be a search both for communal belonging and for solitary escape, a way to loosen the reins of control over your life, and a means of raging against the lack of control you have over the world around you.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda

 

• 

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

by Mónica Ojeda

Translated by Darah Booker

’Ojeda invites you to an Andean retro-futuristic festival in the mountains. Psychedelia, volcanos, disintegration. And then the language burns and nothing is what it seems’ - Mariana Enriquez

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world. Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, heading for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place on the side of a volcano, in the infinite expanse of the páramo. A world of mysticism and underground music, in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains. Noa has been drawn there in search of her father, who, wrestling with the violence of Ecuador, abandoned her as a child. But soon after their arrival at the festival, Noa appears possessed, speaking in a voice that is not her own. Believing Noa to be in danger, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi - the Incan festival of the sun - the girls’ desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, and trauma from transcendence. Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship - one that announces the arrival of a major writer.

GRANTA

Karl Ove Knausgård / Interview

 

Karl Ove Knausgård 

Interview

24 July 2012

There is a side to every man, so deeply personal, that it can only be revealed to strangers. When, at the age of thirty-nine, Karl Ove Knausgård decided to reveal his, the result was a six-tome autobiographical novel, totaling over 3,500 pages, as well as a very public lawsuit brought on by his family, and a subsequent controversy that fed the media in his native Norway for months. That was three years ago, and Knausgård is still uncomfortable with the attention Min Kamp (in English My Struggle, Archipelago, 2012), has received. Then again, naming a book after Hitler’s autobiography would seem to welcome controversy. Tall and slim, standing in front of a small audience in the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in a black leather jacket and tight jeans, Knausgård gave the newly published English translation of his first volume a light squeeze. This, he said, trying to control the thick strands of greying hair that persistently got in his eyes, was as private as a novel could get. In it he revealed his innermost secrets, as well as intimate, merciless details from the lives of family and friends. Everything in it is true, but he refuses to call it a memoir; it is a long confession told with novelistic technique. He felt shame as he wrote it, not because of the nature of content, but because he thought it was devoid of literary value: who would be interested in his life? Eventually he realized that the work was relevant precisely because it was so personal; it created that unique fellowship between the writer and the reader, which is the very core of literature. ‘It is an intimate art form. One author, one reader. That’s it.’

A Strange Bird’s Cry by Karl Ove Knausgård

 

A Strange Bird’s Cry

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas was born in 1897, the same year as William Faulkner, and two years before Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Ernest Hemingway. Vesaas is not usually mentioned in the same breath as the others in this generation, obviously because his books are hardly read outside Scandinavia and, I suppose, because it is easy to think that his books are hardly read outside Scandinavia for a reason, and that reason can only be that they are not as good. But they are.

Jon Fosse / Interview

 

Jon Fosse

Interview
Jon Fosse

1 April 2020

Jon Fosse’s The Other Name describes two consecutive days in the life of its narrator Asle, a painter and widower who lives alone in a remote house in Dylgja. Another identical Asle, also a painter, lives in the nearby town of Bjørgvin. Fosse’s book moves quietly between these two men, two versions of the same person, on different paths. 

Dreamed in Stone by Jon Fosse

Dreamed in Stone 

By Jon Fosse

Translated by Damion Searles

I

No one saw the avalanche because it all fell apart so slowly. Not day by day, not even hour by hour, or minute by minute, but it fell apart. It was falling apart the whole time, and it was an avalanche. It had to be an avalanche, because what else could it be?

Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse

 

The novel Vaim is the first book to be published by Jon Fosse after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. It will be launched in connection with the opening of DIFF 2025.

VAIM HOTEL

by Jon Fosse

Translated by Damion Searles

I was standing outside The Vaim General Store with this fishing set in my hand, and I thought why in the world had I bought myself a fishing rod, no, it had never once crossed my mind to buy fishing gear, because what was I supposed to do with it, it’s true I had liked fishing when I was a boy, but, yes, that was quite a long time ago, still for all I knew it might be fun to stand there on The Quay and cast out the line and reel it in again, maybe, I thought and either way The Shopkeeper was a very good salesman, that was for sure, once you walk through the door of his shop there’s no getting away from him, yes, I thought, and what now, well I’d been thinking I would go to the restaurant, to get dinner, yes because it had been several days since I’d had good hot food, so it would taste good, I thought, and besides I was probably pretty curious to see what it was like in that restaurant, but was I actually allowed to go in there carrying this fishing gear, because I didn’t want to go back up to my room with it, because who knows, maybe I’d run into The Hotel Owner again, maybe with all Brita’s nosiness she’s gone up to my room again to see what I have in my suitcases, yes, she probably has, definitely, since I had nothing to hide she could look at every last thing in there if it made her happy, as far as I was concerned, but it was a bit ridiculous, that Brita woman wasn’t entirely on the level, I thought and I noticed that I had started walking down towards The Quay, not that I wanted to go fishing now, but sooner or later I’d have to try my hand at casting a line or two, I thought, but for now I just wanted go down to The Quay to look around before I went into the restaurant, Vaim Restaurant yes, I thought and I stopped and stood there and looked at the boat tied up there on The Quay, and it was a beautiful boat, big for the kind of boat it was, and the roof extended to almost cover the whole boat, and that was probably just as well, since it rained so much in this part of the country, and the boat was nicely lacquered, yes, the varnish was so shiny that it glittered, yes that boat was a sight to see, and the name it had, Eline, that was a beautiful name, I felt, but now it really was probably time to get some food in me, yes, I thought and then I cut across the parking lot towards the door with Vaim Restaurant painted on it and I opened the door and I could see it was bright and cozy in the restaurant, and a guy was sitting at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, about my age, he had a beer bottle and a glass on the table in front of him and he sat there staring into space, and he didn’t notice that someone had come into the restaurant, he just sat there staring into space like before, there weren’t that many tables in the restaurant, but they were nice old wooden tables, and there were wooden chairs like the one I had in my room around the tables, four wooden chairs for each table, and then on the left there was a counter with a cash register and the menu was written on a kind of blackboard on the wall behind the counter, and there were three dishes to choose from, meatballs, fishcakes, and stew, and below that it said that dessert was fruit cocktail with ice cream and that was it, and then there on the counter there was indeed a sheep bell, just like Brita had said and I went and leaned the fishing set against the wall behind the nearest table, the one closest to the door, and so the farthest away from the man sitting drinking a beer and staring straight ahead, and then I went over to the counter and picked up the sheep bell and shook it, and damn it made a loud sound, so I quickly put it back down on the counter, and the man sitting there with his glass of beer was still only staring straight ahead, yes yes, I thought and I guessed I had to just stand there at the counter and wait, I thought and all of this taken together really was a bit strange, I thought, The Vaim Hotel and The Vaim Restaurant and The Vaim General Store, yes, everything was kind of odd, and I wasn’t so sure whether I liked it or not, no, there was almost something unreal about it all, I thought, and my car, I saw it when I left the store, didn’t I, no, maybe not and I think I should go look out the door to see if it’s there, and I go to the door and I open it, go outside, and yes, well, the car is right where I parked it, so as I can see everything’s fine, I think and I go over to the car and I think that I should check to make sure the doors are locked and they are, every door, and so I should probably go back to the restaurant then, because somebody who can serve me probably has to come soon, I think and I go back into the restaurant and as soon as I’m through the door I see Brita standing there holding up the fishing set and she looks at me

Vaim Hotel is the second of three books

 

Original title: Vaim Hotell
Publisher: Samlaget, 2026
Genre: Novel

VAIM HOTEL
by Jon Fosse

Hotel is the second of three books about the fictional small town of Vaim, each with different characters.

It is a strange story about The Guest and a hotel owner named Brita. The Guest checks into the empty Vaim Hotel, where the commanding and powerful owner Brita holds sway in partnership with The Businessman. The Guest is tricked and lied to and goes from being a guest to working for Brita.

To be published in 2026.