Category Sách & Tri thức

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Awards and prizes, Books, Culture, John Boyne, Sách & Tri thức, Sexuality, Transgender

Polari prize nominees and judges withdraw after inclusion of John Boyne over gender identity views

800 writers and publishing workers have signed a statement objecting to the LGBTQ+ book prize’s nomination of Boyne, who described himself as a ‘terf’

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of UK awards celebrating LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn from the awards over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a “Terf” – the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Two judges have also withdrawn from the prize process, and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. Boyne, who was longlisted for the main Polari book prize for his novella Earth, is best known for his 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

thanhtoong0
August 12, 2025

Autobiography and memoir, Books, Culture, Fiction, John Burnside, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

Where to start with: John Burnside

Seán Hewitt, who introduces a new edition of the Scottish author’s final memoir, guides readers through his landmark works a year on from his death

John Burnside was one of those rare prolific writers whose quality and care was not diminished by the apparent ease with which words arrived. His life’s work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit and light as they are with eroticism and violence. If there is one word I would use to summarise Burnside’s work, it’s grace. He was a graceful writer, in terms of his elegance, but also one concerned with redemption and the moments of light that emerge from sorrow and great pain.

Burnside died in 2024 at the age of 69, not long after being awarded the David Cohen prize for literature, an award that recognises a lifetime’s achievement. Before that, he had won just about every award going in the poetry world: the Forward prize, the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book award among them.

thanhtoong0
August 12, 2025

Books, Culture, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức, Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers

Poem of the week: Autumn by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Keats’s famous ode speaks across time and space to a 21st-century Sri Lankan, whose turbulent history catches on its mellow mood

Autumn
(after John Keats)

The fallen yellow leaves now oftener
flare red. Embers. Blown-up chilli-flakes.
The burning of the library at Jaffna.
Foreign dead about to break
the spell of here and now. Phantasms steal
into the peaceful lives we seem to have earned,
telling tales about what happened
to them, not us, and in a tongue I never learned.
This is my garden, my spade of blood meal
and from our kitchen the time-travelling smell
of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.

thanhtoong0
August 11, 2025

Biography books, Books, Culture, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy

The enigmatic queer poet admired by EM Forster and Jackie Onassis takes centre stage in this unconventional biography

The second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with “enigmatic eyes” beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.

What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has “a global audience he could never have imagined”, thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.

thanhtoong0
August 11, 2025

Books, Culture, Deafness and hearing loss, Health, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

‘I’m carrying survivor’s guilt’: Raymond Antrobus on growing up deaf

The poet reflects on his heritage, his new life as a father in Margate – and why his memoir is a call to arms

When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White” was meant as an insult, the author explains over tea in his flat in Margate, where a pile of toys indicate the recent presence of his own young son. In his cruellest moments, it was a way for Antrobus’s black father, who died in 2014, to say “I don’t understand you. I don’t love you. You don’t understand my pain.”

Antrobus, 38, is calm and reflective when he talks about this. As a deaf person who relies on hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate, he says he has long had to “make sense of myself for other people”.

thanhtoong0
August 9, 2025

Annie Ernaux, Books, Culture, Elena Ferrante, Fiction in translation, Han Kang, Jonathan Franzen, Roberto Bolaño, Sách & Tri thức

‘It’s another form of imperialism’: how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal

There’s a growing appetite for stories from around the globe – if only we can avoid the cliches and exoticism of recent years, writes the International Booker nominee

When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti’s book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature.

A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country’s poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy’s boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi’s wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region’s border: Basilicata was never saved.

thanhtoong0
August 8, 2025

Biopics, Books, Brian Thompson shooting, Culture, Film, James Patterson, Sách & Tri thức, US news

James Patterson to write book about Luigi Mangione

The crime writer and co-author Vicky Ward will recount murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and chart ‘young man’s descent from Ivy League graduate to notorious accused killer’

Bestselling crime writer James Patterson and investigative journalist Vicky Ward are writing a book on the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, while actor Dave Franco said this week that he would be “open” to playing accused murderer Luigi Mangione in a biopic if one were to be made.

Mangione is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Thompson, who was shot and killed in Manhattan on 4 December last year.

thanhtoong0
August 7, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

The Names by Florence Knapp audiobook review – a Sliding Doors-style debut

What happens to a boy called Gordon, Julian or Bear? Irish actor Dervla Kirwan narrates this smart tale about a how a boy’s name influences his life

How influential is a name? This is the question underpinning The Names, which opens with Cora taking her newborn son to register his birth. Her abusive husband Gordon wants his son to be named after him, though, secretly, Cora isn’t keen. She notes how the second syllable lands with “a downward thud like someone slamming down a sports bag”. She prefers Julian, which means “sky father”, though their nine-year-old daughter Maia would like her little brother to be called Bear, since it sounds “soft and cuddly … but also brave and strong”.

Florence Knapp’s smart debut novel features a Sliding Doors-style plot in which the three names are tried out for size, each triggering a different reality. By defying her husband and choosing Bear, Cora is subjected to a beating that prompts a neighbour to intervene and call the police; when she names him Julian, young Maia steps in to defend her mother and break the tension. And when she registers him as Gordon, peace is maintained but not for long; when Cora asks for money to buy baby formula, her husband dispenses a different style of punishment. The repercussions of her decision are felt by their son, too, whose lives under the different names are traced across three decades.

thanhtoong0
August 7, 2025

Books, Culture, Gaza, Human rights, Irvine Welsh, Israel, Israel-Gaza war, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Rosen, Middle East and north Africa, Palestinian territories, Sách & Tri thức, West Bank, World news, Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson sign letter calling for Israel boycott

More than 200 writers request cessation of all trade until people of Gaza given adequate food, water and aid

Middle East crisis – live updates

Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson are among more than 200 writers who have signed a letter calling for an “immediate and complete” boycott of Israel until the people of Gaza are given adequate food, water and aid.

Hanif Kureishi, Brian Eno, Elif Shafak, George Monbiot, Benjamin Myers, Geoff Dyer and Sarah Hall also signed the letter, which advocates the cessation of all “trade, exchange and business” with Israel.

thanhtoong0
August 7, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi review – a panoramic view of India in flux

The political and emotional journey of a young communist revolutionary is brought sensuously to life, in a magnificent epic that took 25 years to write

The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you “can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin” runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India’s former capital. There’s no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that “what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow”.

Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as “an undertaking”. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today’s sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours.

thanhtoong0
August 7, 2025

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