Arab literature is rising in popularity – not yet soaring, but with Celestial Bodies having just won the Man Booker International Prize 2019, we’re going to be seeing an upwards trajectory that gets steeper and steeper in the months and years to come. As an introduction to Arab literature and anyone looking to explore its …
Willow Heath
Poetry is often considered an art form that is entirely personal – both to the poet herself and to the reader. We bond with poems, project ourselves onto them, feel like we are a part of them. They can also be very hard to penetrate; they can intimidate and confuse us. For some, that confusion …
So, the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones has wrapped up. In my opinion, the previous two post-book seasons did a decent job at continuing the story that George R.R. Martin had laid out. Season 8, however, was lacking in character progression, decent dialogue, worthy endings to many story arcs, and any real …
Kronborg Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, can be found at the north-eastern tip of the Danish island of Zealand. It’s a twenty-mile drive from the capital of Copenhagen, and one of the best day-trips you can take – especially if you love your history, wars, literature, and theatre. It’s free entry if you use …
The world is changing, and conversations around both travel and mental health are changing with it. In the West, openness about depression and anxiety is ever-increasing for women and men – right now, 3.4% of the world’s population have been diagnosed with depression, but that number is likely to rise as more and more of …
A.N. Devers is a fierce woman. She’s a writer with an upcoming debut novel (Train), a prolific journalist who’s been featured in The New Yorker and The Guardian, and she’s also the proprietor of The Second Shelf, a bookstore in the heart of Soho. And she’s also super fun and fierce on Twitter. The Second …
We are often told the right ways to love and be loved: what our expectations of love should be and how we ourselves should behave in love. We can predict a good marriage, and should expect one, too. We know what a friend should rightly be called on to do in the name of trust …
As a reader, I’ve been harbouring an impatient lust for some quality contemporary writing which captures the gothic legacy of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Bram Stoker et al. A few have come along recently and entertained well enough – writers such as Jessie Burton and Sarah Perry – but their hype, in my opinion, far …
Learning a new language is equal parts exciting and daunting. Exciting because it gives us access to new cultures, makes travelling more fun and less stressful, and it exercises our brains better than pretty much anything else. And daunting because it’s time-consuming, stressful, and can cost a lot of money. The best way to alleviate …
Translated by David Brookshaw This riveting novel, more than any other I’ve read in recent memory, cemented for me the true value of translated literature. I write predominantly about translated literature because it’s the most valuable, intimate way of learning true empathy for another culture, especially one we may know next-to-nothing about. Through Woman of …