Little Atoms

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. Her debut novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life was longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Award. She is also the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Her writing is published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue,&n...

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and the nonfiction books The Sting and Always Crashing in the Same Car. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell Fellow and is a fou...

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Bo...

Daria Lavelle writes fiction, most of which features at least one impossible thing. Her stories have appeared in Dark Matter, The Deadlands and Dread Machine, among others. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and enjoys opera, escape rooms, and checking restaurants off her bucket list. She was born in Kyiv before immigrating to the US as a child. On this episode ...

Cate Baum was born in Cambridge to a magician and a big band singer. She grew up in the East Anglian countryside, spending summers roaming the wilds of the UK. She studied screenwriting at UCLA and gained a master’s with Distinction in Creative Writing from City, University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel Land of Hope.

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Eley Williams' collection of short stories Attrib. & Other Stories won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her writing appears in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Liberating the Canon, the TLS and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of the novel The Liar’s Dictionary and on this episode of Little Atoms...

Simon Park is Associate Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is an expert in the literature and material culture of the early modern world, particularly from Portugal and its vast global empire. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his new book Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery.

Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biograph...

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood), and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews, Climbing Days, and Outpost. Only After Dark, a BBC Radio 4 series about the nocturnal world, was broadcast to acclaim in 2022.

Dan has written for the Guardian, Economist, Esquire and Monocle. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks ...

Sarah Hesketh is a writer and editor from Pendle, in East Lancashire. She is the author of the poetry collections Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf and The Hard Word Box, and the editor of The Emma Press Anthology of Age. She currently lives in London and works as Managing Editor for Modern Poetry in Translation. On this week’s episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest book 2016.