Little Atoms

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written four novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and Capital, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E.M Forster Award, and the Premi Libreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His latest novel is The Wall. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and commentator. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine, and her novels include Women Who Blow On Knots and The Time of Mute Swans. Her latest novel is How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Julia Shaw is a scientist in the Department of Psychology at University College London (UCL). Her academic work, teaching and role as an expert witness have focused on different ways of understanding criminal behaviour. Dr Shaw has consulted as an expert on criminal cases, delivered police-training and military workshops, and has evaluated offender diversion programs. She is also the co-founder of Spot, a start-up that helps employees report workplace harassment and discrimination, and employers take action. Her work has been featured in outlets such as CNN, the BBC, the New Yorker, WIRED, Forbes, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. She is the author of Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her books include The Eichmann Trial, Denial: holocaust history on trial (a National Jewish Book Award-winner), Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, and Beyond Belief: the American press and the coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945. She lives in Atlanta. Her latest book is Antisemitism Here and Now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kristen R. Ghodsee was travelling in Europe, and spent the summer of 1990 witnessing first-hand the initial hope and euphoria that followed the sudden and unexpected collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Bloc. The political and economic chaos that followed inspired Ghodsee to pursue an academic career studying this upheaval, focusing on how ordinary people’s lives – and women’s particularly – changed when state socialism gave way to capitalism. For the last two decades, she has visited the region regularly and lived for over three years in Bulgaria and the Eastern parts of reunified Germany. Now a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she has won many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has written six books on gender, socialism, and postsocialism, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that continue to haunt the region to this day. Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Aeon, Dissent, Foreign Affairs and The New York Times. Her latest book is Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Georgina Harding is the author of three previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Her first book was a word of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar: A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village on the Coromandel coast. Her latest novel is Land of the Living. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including Timekeepers, A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map, Just My Type and Mauve. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize. His latest book is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. His latest book is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Weymouth's work has been published by a wide variety of outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon river and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-old Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. His first book, Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thea Lim’s novel An Ocean of Minutes is out now from Quercus/Hachette in the UK, Viking/Penguin Random House in Canada, and Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster in the US. Her writing has been published by the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST and others. She has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.