Podcasts by Little Atoms

Little Atoms

Little Atoms is a weekly show about books, with authors in conversation. Produced and presented by Neil Denny.


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Further podcasts by Neil Denny

Podcast on the topic Gesellschaft und Kultur

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 734 - Christine Smallwood's The Life Of The Mind from 2022-01-25T00:01:05

Padraig chats to Harper's and n+1 critic Christine Smallwood about "adjunct lit", therapists, the end of the world, and her debut novel The Life Of The Mind


from 2022-01-18T00:01:03

Michael Brooks talks to Neil about how maths underpins the rise of civilisation in his new book The Art of More.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 730 - Judy Golding on William Golding from 2021-12-21T00:01:43

On the last Little Atoms of 2021, Judy Golding talks to Neil about her father William Golding, on the republication by Faber of The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire.


from 2021-12-14T00:01:45

Rebecca Donner talks to Neil about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack and her part in the German Reistance to Hitler, in her new book All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days.


from 2021-12-07T00:01:16

Tom Chivers joins Neil to talk about walking the historical strata of London and it's hidden rivers, in his new book London Clay.


See from 2021-11-30T00:01:03

Neil talks to Nickolas Butler about his latest novel Godspeed.


See from 2021-11-23T00:01:22

Neil talks to Ruth Ozeki about her latest novel The Book of Form & Emptiness.


See from 2021-11-16T00:01:14

Qian Julie Wang talks to Neil about growing up hungry and afraid in America as an undocumented migrant, in her new memoir Beautiful Country.


See <...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 716 - Lauren Groff's Matrix from 2021-09-20T23:01:17

Lauren Groff returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about her latest novel Matrix, a meticulously recreated historical fiction set in a 12th century abbey.


from 2021-09-16T23:01:14

Julianne Pachico talks to Neil about her Colombia set debut novel The Anthill.


See from 2021-09-13T23:01:07

Joyce Carol Oates talks to Neil about her latest novel Breathe, "a memoir that has been reimagined as a work of fiction" about grief.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 713 - Ece Temelkuran's Together from 2021-09-09T23:01:45

Ece Temelkuran returns to Little Atoms to tell Padraig about Together: Ten Choices for a Better Now, the sequel to the global hit How To Lose A Country. Ece discusses how criticism replaced action,...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 712 - Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees from 2021-09-06T23:01:21

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into 54 languages. Shafak's last novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World wa...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 708 - Laura Lippman's Dream Girl from 2021-08-19T23:01:18

Laura Lippman talks to Neil about the gentrification of Baltimore and using elements of the horror genre in her new novel Dream Girl, and of writing about herself in her essay collection My Life as...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 707 - Brandy Schillace's Mr Humble & Dr Butcher from 2021-08-16T23:01:44

Brandy Schillace tells Neil the incredible story of Dr Robert White and his quest to perform the first head transplant.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 706 - Michael Spitzer's The Musical Human from 2021-08-09T23:01:23

Michael Spitzer talks to Neil about his new history of the world through the evolution of music, The Musical Human.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 701 - Scott Weidensaul's A World On The Wing from 2021-07-05T23:01

Scott Weidensaul is one of the most respected natural history writers in the country. Among the more than 30 books he's written are Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 700 - Jonathan Meades' Pedro and Ricky Come Again from 2021-06-28T23:01

It's the 700th episode of Little Atoms, and writer and filmmaker Jonathan Meades returns for the tenth time to talk to Neil about his new collection of journalism Pedro and Ricky Come Again.
<...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 699 - Juliet Jacques' Variations from 2021-06-21T23:01

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London, and a fellow contributor to Resonance FM. She is the author of Trans: A Memoir, and now a collection of short stories Variatio...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 698 - Cherie Jones and Kate Mosse from 2021-06-14T23:01

Neil talks to Cherie Jones about her Women's Prize shortlisted debut novel How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, and to Kate Mosse about the Women's Prize Trust Discoveries programme.
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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 693 - Philip Hoare's Albert & The Whale from 2021-05-17T23:01

Philip Hoare returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about his fascination with Albrecht Dürer, and Dürer's fascination with painting a whale in his new book Albert & The Whale.
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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 692 - Helen Scales' The Brilliant Abyss from 2021-05-10T23:01

Helen Scales returns to Little Atoms and talks to Neil about exploring the deep oceans, how creatures survive the great depths, and how human activity threatens even the deepest places in her new b...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 687 - Chris Power's A Lonely Man from 2021-04-19T23:01

Chris Power talks to Neil about Russian oligarchs, paranoia and the ethics of using real life in fiction, in his debut novel A Lonely Man.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 686 - Sarah Leipciger's Coming Up For Air from 2021-04-15T23:01

Born and raised in Canada, Sarah Leipciger lives in London with her three children, and teaches creative writing to prisoners. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Asham Award, the Fish P...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 685 - Gavin Francis's Intensive Care from 2021-04-12T23:01

Little Atoms' favourite GP Gavin Francis returns to talk about his new book Intensive Care, which details his experiences of Covid 19.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 682 - Melanie Challenger's How To Be Animal from 2021-04-01T23:01

Melanie Challenger talks to Neil about her new book How To Be Animal, which combines popular science, history and moral philosophy in a wide-ranging and radical new take on the human story...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 681 - Jess Walter's The Cold Millions from 2021-03-29T23:01

Jess Walter talks to Neil about his new novel The Cold Millions, which features union organising, riots and the suppression of protest. Set in Spokane in 1909, but seemingly ripped out of today's h...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 680 - Courttia Newland's A River Called Time from 2021-03-26T00:01

Courttia Newland is the author of The ScholarSnakeskin and The Gospel According to Cane. He co-edited The Penguin Book of New Black Wr...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 679 - Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom from 2021-03-23T00:01

The Author of Homegoing Yaa Gyasi talks to Neil about the American opioid epidemic, finding meaning through both faith and science, and growing up in Alabama in her latest novel Transc...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 678 - Kat Arney's Rebel Cell from 2021-03-19T00:01

Dr Kat Arney talks about how cancer breaks the rules, via naked mole rats, nazi scientists and chimney sweep's scrotums in her new book Rebel Cell. See her website for more details: Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 677 - Sebastian Barry's A Thousand Moons from 2021-03-16T00:01

For the week of St Patrick's Day Neil talks to the current Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry on the paperback release of his latest novel A Thousand Moons. Sebastian talks about f...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 676 - Robert Jones Jr's The Prophets from 2021-03-09T00:01

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned both his B.F.A. in creative writing and M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. His work has been featured in The New York Time...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 675 - Rebecca Watson's little scratch from 2021-03-05T00:01

Rebecca Watson talks to Neil about her debut novel little scratch, which was published recently to critical acclaim. She is one of The Observer’s 10 best debut novelists of 2021. Watson wr...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 672 - Max Porter's The Death of Francis Bacon from 2021-02-23T00:01

Max Porter is the author of Lanny, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 671 - Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby from 2021-02-16T00:01

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 670 Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment from 2021-02-09T09:30

Cal Flyn, author of the memoir Thicker Than Water, talks about her latest book Islands of Abandonment: Life In The Post-Human Landscape. She talks to Neil about her travels to pos...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 669 - Jason Diakité's A Drop of Midnight from 2021-02-02T00:01

Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité is one of Sweden’s most well-known hip-hop artists. Born in Lund to American parents—an African American dad and a white mom—he has released eight solo albums and numerous ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 668 - Andrew Harding's These Are Not Gentle People from 2021-01-29T00:01

Andrew Harding is the BBC's Africa correspondent. He talks to Neil about his new book These Are Not Gentle People, about a crime that shook South Africa and split a community apart.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 667 - Stuart Turton's The Devil And The Dark Water from 2021-01-26T00:01

Stuart Turton's debut novel, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, won the Costa First Novel Award and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for the ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 666 - Ivy Pochoda's These Women from 2021-01-18T00:01

Ivy Pochoda is the author of The Art of DisappearingVisitation Street - a Guardian and Amazon best book of 2013 - and Wonder Valley Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 665 - George Saunders' A Swim In A Pond In The Rain from 2021-01-12T00:01

On this week's show, George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln In The Bardo, talks to Neil about the genius of the Russian short story in his latest book A Swim...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 664 - John Lanchester's Reality and Other Stories from 2020-12-24T00:01

Just in time for Christmas! John Lanchester joins Neil for some spooky stories in his first short story collection, Reality and Other Stories.


See...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 663 - Alex Ross' Wagnerism from 2020-12-08T00:01

Alex Ross graduated from Harvard in 1990. He wrote for the New York Times from 1992 until 1996 when he became staff writer at the New Yorker. His first book, <...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 662 - Noreena Hertz's The Lonely Century from 2020-12-01T00:01

Noreena Hertz is a renowned thought leader, academic, and broadcaster who was named by The Observer “one of the world’s leading thinkers” and by Vogue “one of the world’s most inspiring women.” Her...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 661 - Gavin Francis' Island Dreams from 2020-11-24T00:01

Gavin Francis is an award-winning writer and GP. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, including Adventures in Human Being, which was a Sunday Times b...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 660 - William Boyd's Trio from 2020-11-17T00:01

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. His latest no...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 659 - Rebecca Wragg Sykes' Kindred from 2020-11-10T00:01

Rebecca Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood, and followed this interest through a career researching the most enigmatic characters of ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 658 - Kate Summerscale's The Haunting of Alma Fielding from 2020-10-31T00:01

Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008, winner of the Galaxy British Book o...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 657 - Natalie Haynes' Pandora's Jar from 2020-10-27T00:01

Natalie Haynes is the author of six books, her novels, A Thousand ShipsThe Children of Jocasta, and The Amber Fury, and the non-fiction works, P...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 656 - Gabriel Bergmoser's The Hunted from 2020-10-19T23:01

Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author, who grew up in a small rural town. In 2015 he won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award for his pilot <...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 655 - Matthew Baker's Why Visit America from 2020-10-12T23:01

Matthew Baker is the author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures. His stories have appeared in the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Stor...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 654 - Jo Marchant's The Human Cosmos from 2020-10-05T23:01

Dr Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist. She has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, London, and an MSc in Science Communic...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 653 - Terri White's Coming Undone from 2020-09-28T23:01

Terri White is Editor-in-Chief of Empire magazine, having previously edited some of the most read titles in the UK and US, including Time Out New York and...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 652 - Michael Bond's Wayfinding from 2020-09-21T23:01

Michael Bond, who won the British Psychology Society Prize 2015 for The Power of Others, is a freelance journalist and former senior editor and reporter at New Scientist. Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 651 - David Eagleman's Livewired from 2020-09-17T23:01

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated PBS/BBC tel...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 650 - Susanna Moore's Miss Aluminium from 2020-09-14T23:01

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels The Life of ObjectsThe Big GirlsOne Last Look, In the CutSleeping Beauties,&nbs...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 649 - Sophie Mackintosh's Blue Ticket from 2020-09-07T23:01

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. Sophie talks to Neil about her "a bit speculative, a bit dyst...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 648 - Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain from 2020-08-31T23:01

Douglas Stuart talks to Neil about his Man Booker longlisted, Glasgow set debut novel Shuggie Bain.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 647 - Maria Konnikova's The Biggest Bluff from 2020-08-24T23:01

Maria Konnikova talks to Neil Denny about her latest book The Biggest Bluff, in which she sets out to study luck and instead becomes a professional poker player.


from 2020-08-17T23:01

Luke Turner is a writer and editor based in London. He co-founded the influential music website The Quietus where he runs a regular podcast and radio show. He has contributed to the Gu...

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Little Atoms
From The Archive - Chris Power's Mothers from 2020-08-10T23:01

Chris Power lives and works in London. His 'Brief Survey of the Short Story' has appeared in the Guardian since 2007. His fiction has been published in The Stinging F...

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Little Atoms
From The Archive - Amy Sackville's Painter To The King from 2020-08-03T23:01

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsm...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 646 - Frances Cha's If I Had Your Face from 2020-07-27T23:01

Frances Cha is a former editor for CNN in Seoul and Hong Kong. A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University MFA writing program, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. If I Had Your Face i...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 645 - Jenny Kleeman's Sex Robots and Vegan Meat from 2020-07-20T23:01

Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and documentary-maker who has travelled the world finding extraordinary characters to turn into film, print and audio. She writes for the Guardian, The Times, the Sund...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 644 - Adam Hart's Unfit For Purpose from 2020-07-13T23:01

Adam Hart is a biologist, broadcaster, academic and author. Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire, Adam is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4, and a present...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 643 - Emily Anthes' The Great Indoors from 2020-07-06T23:01

Science Writer Emily Anthes on her new book The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behaviour, Health, and Happiness. Emily talks to Neil about designing bette...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 642 - Simon Stephenson's Set My Heart To Five from 2020-06-29T23:01

Simon Stephenson is an author and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. His previous book Let Not The Waves Of The Sea won Best First Book at the Scottish Book Awards. Set ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 641 - Lars Iyer's Nietzsche And The Burbs from 2020-06-22T23:01

Lars Iyer is the author of the novels Nietzsche and the Burbs (2020) and Wittgenstein Jr (2014). He has also written a trilogy of novels, Spurious, Dogma and Exodus, which has received rave reviews...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 640 - Richard Atkinson's Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract from 2020-06-15T23:01

Richard Atkinson is a publisher who has been behind some of the most successful cookbooks of recent years. He lives in London but has a deep-rooted affection for the north of England, the land of h...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 639 - David Farrier's Footprints from 2020-06-08T23:01

David Farrier teaches English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 he was the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction, and h...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 638 - Mark O'Connell's Notes From An Apocalypse from 2020-06-01T23:01

Mark O'Connell is the author of To Be a Machine, which won the Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2017. He lives in Dublin with his family. He writes for...

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Little Atoms
From The Archive - Fern Riddell's Death In Ten Minutes from 2020-05-25T23:01

Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 637 - Garth Greenwell's Cleanness from 2020-05-18T23:01

Garth Greenwell is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His novella Mitko won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a f...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 636 - Kiran Millwood Hargrave's The Mercies from 2020-05-11T23:01

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist. The Mercies is her first novel for adults. Her bestselling works for children include The Gir...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 635 - Ingrid Persaud's Love After Love from 2020-05-04T23:01

Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC Short Story Award in 2018. She read law at the LSE and was a legal academic before taking degrees in fine...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 634 - Philip Hensher's A Small Revolution in Germany from 2020-04-27T23:01

Philip Hensher has written eleven novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 633 - Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel from 2020-04-20T23:01

Eimear McBride is the author of the novels The Lesser Bohemians (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (winner ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 632 - Rosanna Amaka's The Book of Echoes from 2020-04-13T23:01

Rosanna Amaka was born to African and Caribbean parents. She began writing her debut novel The Books of Echoes twenty years ago to give voice to the Brixton community in which she grew up....

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Little Atoms
From The Archive - Damian Barr's You Will Be Safe Here from 2020-04-06T23:01

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist. Maggie & Me, his memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher's Britain, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 631 - Stephen Moss' The Accidental Countryside from 2020-03-30T23:01

Stephen Moss is a naturalist, broadcaster, television producer and author. In a distinguished career at the BBC Natural History Unit his credits included SpringwatchBi...

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Little Atoms
From the Archive - Yara Rodrigues Fowler's Stubborn Archivist from 2020-03-24T00:01

Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a novelist from South London. She is also a trustee of Latin American Women's Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe for and by Latin American Women....

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 630 - Ben Halls' The Quarry from 2020-03-17T00:01

Ben Halls is a London-based writer and journalist. He worked in pubs, off licences and several minimum wage jobs before deciding to return to school to pursue his passion for writing. In 2014 Ben c...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 629 - Peter Swanson's Rules For Perfect Murders from 2020-03-10T00:01

Peter Swanson's novels include The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, nominated for an LA Times book award, The Kind Worth Killing, a Richard and Judy pic...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 628 - Rosamund Lupton's Three Hours from 2020-03-03T00:01

Rosamund Lupton is the author of Sister, a BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime", a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, winner of the Strand Maga...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 627 - Gaia Vince's Transcendence from 2020-02-25T00:01

Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and&nb...

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Little Atoms
From the Archive - Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley from 2020-02-18T00:01

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's P...

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Little Atoms
From the Archive - Lauren Groff's Florida from 2020-02-11T00:01

Lauren Groff is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels – Fates and Furies (named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015), The Monsters of Templeton an...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 626 - Eoin Colfer's Highfire from 2020-02-04T00:01

Eoin Colfer is the author of the internationally bestselling Artemis Fowl series, which has been translated into over forty languages. A Disney film adaptation will be released in 2019, di...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 625 - An Yu's Braised Pork from 2020-01-28T00:01

An Yu was born and raised in Beijing, and left at the age of eighteen to study in New York at NYU. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English. Braised Pork...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 624 - Ziya Tong's The Reality Bubble from 2020-01-21T00:01

Ziya Tong is on the board of WWF International and was formerly the Vice Chair of WWF Canada. She presented Daily Planet, Discovery Channel's flagship science programme, until it...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 623 - Susannah Cahalan's The Great Pretender from 2020-01-14T00:01

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 622 - Romesh Gunesekera's Suncatcher from 2019-12-17T00:01

Romesh Gunesekera is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction including Reef, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Sandglass, winner of the inaugural BBC...

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Little Atoms 621 - James Meek's To Calais, In Ordinary Time from 2019-12-10T00:01

James Meek is the author of six novels including The People's Act of Love which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 620 - Caleb Klaces' Fatherhood from 2019-12-06T00:01

Padraig Reidy hosts this episode, joined by Caleb Klaces to discuss his debut novel Fatherhood. They talk about the place of being a father today, the value of home and the novel as an adu...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 619 - Emma Forrest's Royals from 2019-12-03T00:01

Emma Forrest has published three novels, an essay collection and the memoir Your Voice In My Head. An Anglo-American currently based in London, she recently wrote and directed her fea...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 618 - Amelia Gentleman's The Windrush Betrayal from 2019-11-26T00:01

In this episode Neil speaks to Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman. She was named journalist of the year (Press Gazette) and won the 2018 Paul Foot journalism award for her reportage on the...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 617 - David Keenan's For The Good Times from 2019-11-19T00:01

David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author of two novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device,...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 616 Téa Obreht's Inland from 2019-11-15T00:01

Téa Obreht is the author of The Tiger's Wife, winner of the Orange Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and her latest novel is Inland. She was born in Belgrade, in t...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms - Henry McDonald's Two Souls from 2019-11-12T00:01

Padraig Reidy hosts this week, speaking to Guardian journalist and author Henry McDonald about his novel Two Souls. They talk punk, football and paramilitary activity in 70s and 80s Belfas...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 614 - Sarah Perry's Melmoth from 2019-11-05T00:01

This week Neil speaks to Sarah Perry, author of the bestselling The Essex Serpent, which won Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 and Book of the Year 2017 at the British Book Awards. Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 613 - Elle Nash's Animals Eat Each Other from 2019-10-29T00:01

Elle Nash is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Elle, NAILED, Reality Beach, Hobart, and o...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 612 - Casey Cep's Furious Hours from 2019-10-24T23:01

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She is a staff writ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 611 - Mars by 1980 from 2019-10-21T23:01

Author and music journalist David Stubbs joins Neil to talk about his latest book Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music. They chat about the evolution of synthesisers, the women who ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 610 - Fatima Bhutto's New Kings of the World from 2019-10-14T23:01

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of five previous books of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Shadow of...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 609 - Lillian Li's Number One Chinese Restaurant from 2019-10-10T23:01

Lillian Li joins Neil to talk about her debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction.


from 2019-10-07T23:01

Novelist Ben Fergusson joins Neil to talk about An Honest Man, the final book of his Berlin Trilogy. They discuss writing against the backdrop of 1989 Berlin, the summer after leaving scho...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 607 - Madeline Stevens' Devotion from 2019-09-30T23:01

Madeline Stevens joins Neil to talk about her first novel, Devotion. They discuss the drafts and graft that come before a debut novel, how Madeline's seven years spent working as a nanny i...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 606 - Julian Hoffman's Irreplaceable from 2019-09-23T23:01

Julian Hoffman joins Neil to talk about his latest book Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places. They discuss the aborted attempt by Boris Johnson to build an airport on the marsh...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 605 - Niven Govinden's This Brutal House from 2019-09-16T23:01

Niven Govinden joins Neil to talk about his new novel This Brutal House, about family and protest in the vogue ball community of 1980s New York. Govinden's previous novels include All ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 604 - Ben Smith's Doggerland from 2019-09-12T23:01

Ben Smith is a lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, specializing in environmental literature and focusing particularly on oceans, climate change and the ‘Anthropocene’. He joined Ne...

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Little Atoms 603 - Richard Osmond's Rock, Paper, Scissors from 2019-09-10T10:23:37

Poet Richard Osmond joins Neil to talk about his latest collection, Rock, Paper, Scissors, inspired by his experiences during the London Bridge terrorist attack on 3rd June 2017.


...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 602 - Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror from 2019-09-02T23:01

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the essay collection Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion is her first book. She joined Neil to talk about h...

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Little Atoms 601 - Rachel DeLoache Williams' My Friend Anna from 2019-08-26T23:01:40

Rachel DeLoache Williams is an ex-Vanity Fair photo editor and author of My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress. She tells Neil about her friendship with Anna Delvey, the 'Russia...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 600 - Laura Cumming's On Chapel Sands from 2019-08-19T23:01

It's the 600th Little Atoms! and Neil welcomes Laura Cumming back to the show. Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her book, The Vanishin...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 599 - Claire McGlasson's The Rapture from 2019-08-12T23:01

Claire McGlasson is a journalist who works for ITV News and enjoys the variety of life on the road with a TV camera. She lives in Cambridgeshire. The Rapture is her debut novel.<...

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Little Atoms 598 - Lee Jackson's Palaces of Pleasure from 2019-08-05T23:01

Lee Jackson is a Victorian enthusiast, creator of the popular online resource on the social history of Victorian London, www.victorian...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 597 - Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift from 2019-07-29T23:01

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Afr...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 596 - Caroline Crampton's The Way To The Sea from 2019-07-22T23:01

Caroline Crampton is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday and the New Humanist. She has appeared as a broadcaster on Newsnigh...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms Live at Idler Festival w. Josh Cohen from 2019-07-18T23:01

Recorded live at the Idler Festival 2019 at Fenton House, Hampstead. Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. H...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 595 - Carolina Setterwall's Let's Hope For The Best from 2019-07-15T23:01

Carolina Setterwall was born in 1978 in Sala, Sweden. She studied Media and Communication in Uppsala, Stockholm and London and has worked within the music and publishing industries as an editor and...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 594 - Angela Saini's Superior from 2019-07-08T23:01

Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Observer, New Scientist, Wired, New Humanist among others, and she regularly pres...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 593 - Keith Kahn-Harris' Strange Hate from 2019-07-04T23:01

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, associate lecturer at Birkbeck College, and associate fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 592 - Anna Sherman's The Bells of Old Tokyo from 2019-07-01T23:01

Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Oxford before moving to Tokyo in 2001. The Bells of Old Tokyo is her first bo...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 591 - Richard King's The Lark Ascending from 2019-06-24T23:01

Richard King is the author of the acclaimed How Soon Is Now?, which was named Sunday Times Music Book of the Year, and Original Rockers. His writing has ap...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 590 - Wayetu Moore's She Would Be King from 2019-06-17T23:01

Wayétu Moore is the founder of One Moore Book and is a graduate of Howard University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. She teaches at the City University of New ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 589 - Nathaniel Rich's Losing Earth from 2019-06-10T23:01

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s,&...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 588 - Pete Brown's Pie Fidelity from 2019-06-06T23:01

Pete Brown is a British author, journalist, blogger and broadcaster specialising in food and drink, especially the fun parts like beer and cider. His broad, fresh approach takes in social...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 587 - Joanne Ramos' The Farm from 2019-06-03T23:01

Joanne Ramos was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated with a BA from Princeton University. After working in investment banking and private-equity investing...

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Little Atoms 586 - Hamid Ismailov's The Devils' Dance from 2019-05-27T23:01

Born in 1954 in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed `unacceptable democratic tendencies'. He ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 585 - Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl from 2019-05-23T23:01

Andrea Lawlor lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College. Lawlor is a fiction editor for Fence and the author of a chapbook, Position Pa...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 584 - Season Butler's Cygnet from 2019-05-20T23:01

Season Butler is a writer, artist and dramaturg born in Washington, DC. Through her work, she explores her interest in identity and otherness, the opportunities and traps of hindsight and hope, and...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 583 - Dan Richards' Outpost from 2019-05-16T23:01

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood) and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews and Cli...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 582 - Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships from 2019-05-13T23:01

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Children of Jocasta and The Amber Fury, which was shortlisted for the Scottish Crime Book of th...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 581 - Iain Reid's Foe from 2019-05-09T23:01:45

Iain Reid is the author of two critically acclaimed, award-winning books of nonfiction. His internationally bestselling debut novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, has been ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 580 - Bret Easton Ellis' White from 2019-05-06T23:01

Bret Easton Ellis is the author of several novels, including Imperial Bedrooms, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 579 - Bev Thomas' A Good Enough Mother from 2019-05-02T23:01:48

Bev Thomas was a clinical psychologist in the NHS for many years. She currently works as an organisational consultant in mental health and other services. A Good Enough Mother is her ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 578 - Jarett Kobek's Only Americans Burn in Hell from 2019-04-29T23:01

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA, a psychedelic biography of the 9/11 bomber Mohamed Atta, was an unexplained bestseller in parts ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 577 - Isabella Hammad's The Parisian from 2019-04-25T23:01:19

Isabella Hammad was born in London. She won the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story 'Mr. Can’aan'. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions and the Paris Review. The Parisian is ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 576 - Will Ashon's Chamber Music from 2019-04-22T23:01

Will Ashon is the author of Strange Labyrinth (Granta, 2017) and two novels. He previously ran BIG DADA records where his artists included Roots Manuva, MF ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 575 - Temi Oh's Do You Dream of Terra-Two? from 2019-04-18T23:01

Temi Oh graduated from King’s College London in 2015 with a BSci in Neuroscience. While at KCL, Temi founded and ran a book-club called “Neuroscience-fiction”, where she led discussions about scien...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 574 - Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs from 2019-04-15T23:01:02

Steve Brusatte is a palaeontologist on the faculty of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He grew up in the Midwestern United States and has a BS in Geophysical Sc...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 573 - A K Benjamin's Let Me Not Be Mad from 2019-04-11T23:01

A K Benjamin is a Clinical Neuropsychologist, specialising in diagnostics and acute rehab. Previously he was a screenwriter, spent two years as a contemplative monk and has worked at a number of NG...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 572 - Hanna Jameson's The Last from 2019-04-08T23:01

Hanna Jameson wrote her first book at the age of seventeen. Paul Rees of Q Magazine described her as writing like 'an angel on speed'. She has worked for the NHS and travelled the USA, Japan and Eu...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 571 - Adam Foulds' Dream Sequence from 2019-04-04T23:01

Adam Foulds most recent books are In the Wolf's Mouth; The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize f...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 570 - Damian Barr's You Will Be Safe Here from 2019-04-01T23:01

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist. Maggie & Me, his memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher's Britain, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 569 Jan Carson's The Fire Starters from 2019-03-29T00:01

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, followed by short story colle...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 568 - Luke Turner's Out of the Woods from 2019-03-26T00:01

Luke Turner is a writer and editor based in London. He co-founded the influential music website The Quietus where he runs a regular podcast and radio show. He has contributed to the Gu...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 567 - Lewis Dartnell's Origins from 2019-03-22T00:00

Lewis Dartnell is a Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He has won several awards for his science writing, and contributes to the Guardian, the Times and the New Sc...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 566 - Yara Rodrigues Fowler's Stubborn Archivist from 2019-03-19T00:01

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in a Brazilian-English household in London, where she still lives. She has a BA in English from Oxford and an MA in Comparative Literature at UCL. Yara is a trustee of...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 565 - Ken Hollings' The Space Oracle from 2019-03-15T00:00

Ken Hollings is a writer, broadcaster, cultural theorist and lecturer based in London. He is the author of the books Destroy All Monsters, Welcome To Mars, and The Bright Laby...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 564 - Fatima Bhutto's The Runaways from 2019-03-12T00:01

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1982. She grew up in Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of four previous books, most recently the highly acclaimed The Shadow of the Crescent...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 563 - Max Porter's Lanny from 2019-03-08T00:00

Max Porter is the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which has been translated into twenty languages worldwide, and been made into a stage play starring Cillian Murphy. His latest...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 562 - John Lanchester's The Wall from 2019-03-05T00:01

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, wh...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 561 - Ece Temelkuran's How To Lose A Country from 2019-03-01T00:00

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 Allg...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 560 - Dr Julia Shaw's Making Evil from 2019-02-26T00:01

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 understa...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 559 - Deborah Lipstadt's Antisemitism Here And Now from 2019-02-20T12:09:02

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 Nationa...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 558 - Kristen Ghodsee's Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism from 2019-02-12T00:01

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 unexpec...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 557 - Georgina Harding's Land of the Living from 2019-02-05T00:01

Georgina Harding is the author of three previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas CaveThe Spy Game and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 556 - Simon Garfield's In Miniature from 2019-01-29T00:01

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including TimekeepersA Notable Woman (as editor), To the LetterO...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 555 - Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel from 2019-01-22T00:01

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 edito...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 554 - Adam Weymouth's Kings of the Yukon from 2019-01-15T00:01

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...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 553 - Thea Lim's An Ocean of Minutes from 2019-01-08T00:01

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. ...

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Little Atoms
From The Archive - Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation from 2019-01-01T00:01

To see in the New Year, here's a repeat of our Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh from August. Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book,  Listen

Little Atoms
From the Archive - Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt from 2018-12-25T00:01

For Christmas Day, here's a repeat of our interview from June 2018 with Adam Kay. Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including Mitchell & Webb ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 552 - David Frye's Walls from 2018-12-18T00:01

David Frye is a professor and historian, whose research has taken him around the world and involved him in numerous archaeological digs since receiving his PhD from Duke University. He has publishe...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 551 - Jeff Jackson's Destroy All Monsters from 2018-12-11T00:01

Jeff Jackson is the author of Mira Corpora, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has appeared in GuernicaVice, and&nbs...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 550 - Paul Ewen's Francis Plug: Writer in Residence from 2018-12-04T00:01

This week Padraig Reidy talks to Paul Ewen. Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer based in south London. His work has appeared in the British Council's New Writing anthology, the ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 549 - R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries from 2018-11-27T00:01

R. O. Kwon is the author of the novel The Incendiaries. Her writing is published in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, Noon, Electric Lite...

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Little Atoms 548 - Thomas Page McBee's Amateur from 2018-11-20T00:01

Thomas Page McBee was ‘masculinity expert’ for Vice and the first trans man ever to box at Madison Square Garden. His essays and reportage have appeared in the New York ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 547 - Robert Olen Butler's Paris in the Dark from 2018-11-13T00:01

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small H...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 546 - Richard Skinner's Writing a Novel from 2018-11-06T00:01

Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and critic. His most recent book, The Mirror, was described as ‘beautifully written . . . immersive . . . captivating’ by the Guardian Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 545 - Rose George's Nine Pints from 2018-10-30T00:01

Rose George is the author of A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World, and The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, which was judged one of the bes...

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Little Atoms 544 - Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall from 2018-10-22T23:01

Sarah Moss is the author of six novels and a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels are Cold Earth, Night ...

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Little Atoms 543 - Jonathan Ames' The Extra Man from 2018-10-18T23:01

Jonathan Ames is the author of nine books including The Extra Man, Wake Up, Sir!, and You Were Never Really Here, all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 542 - Ivy Pochoda's Wonder Valley from 2018-10-15T23:01

Ivy Pochoda is a novelist and writer, previously a world ranked squash player. Her novel Visitation Street was chosen as an Amazon Best Book of 2013 and a Barnes & Noble Disc...

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Little Atoms 541 - Patrick deWitt's French Exit from 2018-10-11T23:01

Patrick deWitt is the author of The Sisters Brothers, which won the Governor General's Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. He ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 540 - Michael Redhill's Bellevue Square from 2018-10-08T23:01

Michael Redhill is the author of nine novels including Consolation, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Martin Sloane, a finalist for the Giller Prize, Canada'...

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Little Atoms 539 - Adam Rutherford's The Book of Humans from 2018-10-01T23:01

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first g...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 538 - Jean Hannah Edelstein's This Really Isn't About You from 2018-09-24T23:02

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She writes regularly for numerous outlets including The Guardian and The Pool, and a weekly TinyLetter, which&nb...

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Little Atoms 537 - Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure from 2018-09-20T23:01

Sophie Mackintosh won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta magazine and TANK magazine among others. her debu...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 536 - Nell Stevens' Mrs Gaskell and Me from 2018-09-17T23:01

Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the ...

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Little Atoms 535 - Amy Sackville's Painter to the King from 2018-09-13T23:01

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsm...

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Little Atoms 534 - Tim Parks' Out of My Head from 2018-09-10T23:01

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, in...

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Little Atoms 533 - Miriam Toews' Women Talking from 2018-09-06T23:01

Miriam Toews was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published four novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary award...

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Little Atoms 532 - Lauren Groff's Florida from 2018-09-03T23:01

Lauren Groff is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels – Fates and Furies (named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015), The Monsters of Templeton an...

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Little Atoms 531 - Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation from 2018-08-30T23:01

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award.&n...

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Little Atoms 530 - Michael Donkor's Hold from 2018-08-27T23:01

Michael Donkor was born in London, to Ghanaian parents. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and now teaches English Literature to...

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Little Atoms 529 - Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley from 2018-08-20T23:01

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Priz...

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Little Atoms 528 - William Atkins' The Immeasurable World from 2018-08-13T23:01

William Atkins’s first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright Prize. He works as an editor and his journalism has appeared in the Guardian and&...

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Little Atoms 527 - Madeline Miller's Circe from 2018-08-06T23:01

Madeline Miller has a BA and MA from Brown University in Latin and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching both for over a decade. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama, specialising in ada...

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Little Atoms 526 - Gavin Francis' Shapeshifters from 2018-07-30T23:01

Gavin Francis is a GP, and the author of True NorthEmpire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins, which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and was shortl...

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Little Atoms 525 - Laura Lippman’s Sunburn from 2018-07-23T23:01

Laura Lippman has been awarded every major prize in crime fiction. Since the publication of What the Dead Know, each of her hardcovers has hit the New York Times bestseller list. A recent reci...

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Little Atoms 524 - Miranda Doyle's A Book of Untruths from 2018-07-16T23:01

Miranda Doyle's family come from the tiny island of Coney in Sligo Bay. She grew up in Edinburgh alongside three brothers and a suspicious number of ill-fated pets. With an MA from Goldsmiths in Cr...

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Little Atoms 523 - Dorthe Nors' Mirror, Shoulder, Signal from 2018-07-12T23:01

Dorthe Nors was born in 1970 and studied literature at the University of Aarhus. She is one of the most original voices in contemporary Danish literature. Her short stories have appeared in numerou...

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Little Atoms 522 - Fred Pearce's Fallout from 2018-07-09T23:01

Fred Pearce is an award-winning journalist and author, reporting from 87 countries. He is the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine, a regular br...

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Little Atoms 521 - Sarah Churchwell's Behold, America from 2018-07-05T23:01

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Ca...

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Little Atoms 520 - Tim Winton's The Shepherd's Hut from 2018-07-02T23:01

Tim Winton has published over twenty books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into many different languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the&nbs...

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Little Atoms 519 - Sharlene Teo's Ponti from 2018-06-28T23:01

Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Priz...

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Little Atoms 518 - Fern Riddell's Death in Ten Minutes from 2018-06-25T23:01

Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, ...

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Little Atoms 517 - Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt from 2018-06-21T23:01

Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including Mitchell & Webb and Very British Problems. He previously worked as a junior doctor, ...

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Little Atoms 516 - Inara Verzemnieks & Among the Living and the Dead from 2018-06-18T23:01

Inara Verzemnieks teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writ...

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Little Atoms 515 - Daniel Trilling's Lights in the Distance from 2018-06-11T23:01

Daniel Trilling is the editor of New Humanist magazine and has reported extensively on refugees in Europe. His work has been published in the London Review of Books Listen

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Little Atoms 514 - Aida Edemariam's The Wife's Tale from 2018-06-04T23:01

Aida Edemariam, whose father is Ethiopian and mother Canadian, grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto, and has worked as...

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Little Atoms 513 - Ziyad Marar's Judged from 2018-05-28T23:01

Ziyad Marar is the author of Intimacy (2014), Deception (The Art of Living) (2008) and The Happiness Paradox (2003) an...

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Little Atoms 512 - Lucy Wood's The Sing of the Shore from 2018-05-21T23:01

Lucy Wood is the critically acclaimed author of Diving Belles, a collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore, and Weathering, a debut novel about mothers, daughters and ghosts. She has be...

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511 - Chris Power's Mothers from 2018-05-15T08:00

Chris Power lives and works in London. His 'Brief Survey of the Short Story' has appeared in the Guardian since 2007. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly<...

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510 - Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing from 2018-05-07T23:00

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency and the Strauss Liv...

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509 - Leo Benedictus’ Consent from 2018-04-30T23:01

Leo Benedictus is a freelance feature writer for the Guardian and other publications. His first novel, The Afterparty was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. His latest novel is Consent.


<...

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508 - Kathryn Mannix's With The End In Mind from 2018-04-29T23:01

In the third of our shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Dr Kathryn Mannix about her book With The End in Mind.


Kathryn Mannix has spent ...

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507 - Wellcome Prize part 2 with Lindsey Fitzharris and Ayobami Adebayo from 2018-04-26T23:01

In the Second of three shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Lindsey Fitzharris about The Butchering Art, and Ayobami Adebayo about her novel S...

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506 - Jillian Scudder's Astroquizzical from 2018-04-23T23:01

Jillian Scudder is an astrophysicist and assistant professor at Oberlin College, Ohio. She has been writing ‘Astroquizzical’, a blog answering space-related questions from the public, for over five...

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504 - Wellcome Prize Special part 1: Meredith Wadman and Sigrid Rausing from 2018-04-19T23:01

In the first of three shows featuring shortlisted writers for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, Neil talks to Meredith Wadman about The Vaccine Race, and Sigrid Rausing about Mayhem: A Memoir.

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Little Atoms
504: David Adams' Genius With from 2018-04-16T23:00

Dr David Adam is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop and an editor at Nature, the world’s top scientific journal. Before that he...

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Little Atoms
503 - Aminatta Forna's Happiness from 2018-04-09T23:00

Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels The Hired ManThe Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and the memoir The Devil that Danced on the...

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Little Atoms
Penderyn Book Prize Special - David Hepworth from 2018-04-05T23:00

David Hepworth has been writing, broadcasting and speaking about music and media since the seventies. He was involved in the launch and editing of magazines such as Smash Hits, Q, ...

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Little Atoms
501 - Jim Crace's The Melody from 2018-04-02T23:00

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of eleven previous books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarant...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 500! Philip Hensher’s The Friendly Ones from 2018-03-26T23:01

The 500th Little Atoms! Philip Hensher has written nine novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers and Scenes from Early Life, whi...

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Little Atoms
499 - Cathi Unsworth’s Old Black Magic from 2018-03-20T00:01

Cathi Unsworth began a career in journalism at nineteen on the music weekly Sounds, and has since worked for music, arts, film and lifestyle journals. She is the author of five previous novels...

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Little Atoms
498: Matthew Sweet's Operation Chaos from 2018-03-13T00:01

Matthew Sweet is a journalist and broadcaster. He presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The F...

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Little Atoms
495 - Tim Baker's City Without Stars from 2018-02-27T00:01

Born in Sydney, Tim Baker lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about jazz. He has worked on film projects in India, China, Mexico, Brazil and Australia, and currently liv...

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Little Atoms
494 - Abi Andrews' The Word for Woman is Wilderness from 2018-02-20T00:01

Abi Andrews was born in 1991 in the Midlands, and now lives and works in South East London. She studied English and creative writing at Goldsmiths, and her work has been published in The Dark ...

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Little Atoms
493 - Daniel Pink's When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. from 2018-02-13T00:00

Daniel H. Pink is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling Drive, To Sell is Human and A Whole New Mind. His books h...

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Little Atoms
492 - Mohsin Hamid and Jon McGregor from 2018-02-06T00:01

Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Risi...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 491 - Tony White's The Fountain in the Forest from 2018-01-30T00:01

Tony White  is the author of novels including Foxy-T, the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans and editor and co-editor of short story collections including Cr...

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Little Atoms
490 - Ausma Zehanat Khan & Valeria Luiselli from 2018-01-23T00:00

Ausma Zehanat Khan holds a Ph.D. in International Human Rights Law with a specialisation in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. She has practised immigration law and taught huma...

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Little Atoms
489 - Caspar Henderson's New Map of Wonders from 2018-01-16T00:00

Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. F...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Orwell in Tribune from 2018-01-10T00:00:44

George Orwell wrote some of his most renowned essays for the British left-wing publication Tribune between 1940 and 1947, including Books vs Cigarettes, You And The Atom Bomb and the regula...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Professor Brian Cox from 2017-12-31T11:32:55

A classic Little Atoms from 2010 to ease you into the new year: Professor Brian Cox takes on the big questions, including what happens if you put a cat in a Large Hadron Collider


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Little Atoms
488 - Celeste Ng and Susie Boyt from 2017-12-19T00:00

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Everything I Ne...

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Little Atoms
487 - Julie Bindel and John Crace from 2017-12-12T00:00

Julie Bindel is a renowned investigative journalist, and has written extensively on religious fundamentalism, violence against women, the international surrogacy trade, mail order brides, traffi...

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Little Atoms
486 John Higgs' Watling Street from 2017-12-05T00:00

John Higgs is the author of I HAVE AMERICA SURROUNDED: THE LIFE OF TIMOTHY LEARY; THE KLF: CHAOS, MAGIC AND THE BAND WHO BURNED A MILLION POUNDS; STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: MAKING SENS...

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Little Atoms
Converging Cultures - Apocalypse Now from 2017-12-02T00:00

Contagion has haunted so much of 20th century culture, from Camus’s Plague to Romero’s zombies. In this episode, we examine real and imagined epidemics, and meet the people whose job it is to ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atom 485 - Judith Matloff's The War Is In The Mountains from 2017-11-28T00:00

Judith Matloff is a Harvard graduate and teaches conflict reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications includin...

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Little Atoms
Converging Cultures Episode 3: Faces of war from 2017-11-25T00:00

Futurists like Marinetti and D’Annunzio revelled in the destructive energy of battle, but in Weimar Germany after world war 1, artists such as Otto Dix and Hans Fallada documented the horror of dis...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 484 - Joshua Cohen's Moving Kings from 2017-11-21T00:00

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, ...

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Little Atoms
Converging Cultures Episode 2 - All in your head from 2017-11-18T00:00:34

“Mesmerism” was a part of mainstream medicine in the 19th century, with many believing the unprovable concept of “animal magnetism”. The idea influenced everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sigm...

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Little Atoms
Angela Saini's Inferior - How Science Got Women Wrong from 2017-11-14T00:08:33

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist, author and broadcaster. She is the author of Geek Science: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World, and her latest book is Inferior: How Sci...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms presents...Electric Enlightenment from 2017-11-11T00:00

Episode 1 of Little Atoms' documentary series "Converging Cultures" explores the influence of science on the Romantic and Gothic imagination. Electricity captivated the greatest minds of the “ag...

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Little Atoms
From the archive - Ann Druyan from 2017-11-07T00:00

Ann Druyan is an author and television and film writer & producer whose work is largely concerned with the effects of science and technology on our civilization. She was co-writer with  Listen

Little Atoms
482: Marcel Theroux's The Secret Books from 2017-10-31T09:46:43

Marcel Theroux is the author of five novels: A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, The Paperchase (winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award), Far North (short...

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Little Atoms
481: Marcus Du Sautoy and Jamie Perera's Sound of Proof from 2017-10-24T17:07:13

Marcus Du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics and Simonyi Professor for the Public understanding of Science at Oxford University, and Jamie Perera is a composer and sound artist. In this show we tal...

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Little Atoms
480 - David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt's Runaway Species from 2017-10-16T23:00

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. His scientific research is published in journals from Science to Nature, and he is also the author of the internationally bestselling book...

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Little Atoms
479 - Dallas Campbell's Ad Astra from 2017-10-09T23:00

Dallas Campbell has presented some of the most ambitious landmark series across the BBC, such as City in the Sky with Dr Hannah Fry and Stargazing Live with Dara O'Brian and Brian Cox, which includ...

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Little Atoms
478 - Christopher Bollen's The Destroyers from 2017-10-02T23:00

Christopher Bollen is a writer who lives in New York City. He regularly writes about art, literature, and culture. He is the author of Lightning People and Orient and is currently the Editor at Lar...

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Little Atoms
477: Sarah Sentilles' Draw Your Weapons from 2017-09-25T23:00

A former theologian, Sarah Sentilles completed her undergraduate degree at Yale and both a Masters and a Doctorate at Harvard. She was a college professor for over a decade before becoming a full t...

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Little Atoms
From the archive - Jonathan Meades from 2017-09-18T23:00

Jonathan Meades is a writer on architecture, culture and food, a novelist and television presenter, and a longtime friend of Little Atoms. This episode, marking the release of a boxset of Jonathan'...

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Little Atoms
476: Nicole Krauss and Kamila Shamsie from 2017-09-11T14:25:36

Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as 'one of America's most important novelists'. She is the author of the international bestsellers, Great House, which was a finalist for the Nat...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Misha Glenny's Dark Market from 2017-09-07T08:21:14

Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. As the Central Europe Correspondent first for the Guardian and then for the BBC, he chronicled the collapse of communism and the wars in th...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Naomi Alderman's Liars' Gospel from 2017-08-29T08:22:13

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages; like her second novel, The Lessons, it was read on BBC radio'...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Jon Ronson, October 2005 from 2017-08-22T08:50:32

Writer Jon Ronson has been one of Little Atoms most regular guests. In his very first appearance on the show in 2005, he talked to Neil Denny and Richard Sanderson about the odd and unusual charact...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Martin Rees - From Here to Infinity from 2017-08-15T09:15:31

Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was the President of the Royal Society until 2010, and is the Astronomer Roya...

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Little Atoms
475: Vanessa Potter & Pía Spry-Marqués from 2017-08-08T09:55:04

Vanessa Potter spent 16 years as an award-winning broadcast producer in London's advertising industry, before one day fate conspired to turn the lights out on her. Suddenly losing then slowly regai...

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Little Atoms
474: Ryan Gattis & Zinzi Clemmons from 2017-08-01T10:11:55

Ryan Gattis is the author of Kung Fu and All Involved, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award & the Lire Award for Noir of the Year in France. Gattis lives and writes in Los Angele...

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Little Atoms
473: Jeff Sparrow in Search of Paul Robeson from 2017-07-25T09:38:13

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a fortnightly column for The Guardian and contributes regularly to many other Australian and international publications. Jeff is a membe...

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Little Atoms
472: Elena Lappin's What Language Do I Dream In? from 2017-07-18T10:00

Elena Lappin is a writer and editor. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Prague and Hamburg, and has lived in Israel, Canada, the United States and – longer than anywhere else – in London. She is the au...

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Little Atoms
471: Rachel McCormack's Chasing the Dram from 2017-07-11T11:06:22

Rachel McCormack is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4s The Kitchen Cabinet, and has also broadcast on the station's From Our Own Correspondent, the Food Programme and appeared as an expert guest o...

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Little Atoms
470: Jean Hanff Korelitz & Kanishk Tharoor from 2017-07-04T10:00

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of the novels A Jury Of Her Peers, The Sabbathday River...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 469: John Grindrod's Outskirts from 2017-06-27T09:16:46

John Grindrod grew up on 'the last road in London' on Croydon's New Addington housing estate, surrounded by the Green Belt. He is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postw...

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Little Atoms
468: Jason Hickel's the Divide from 2017-06-20T10:00

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Originally from Swaziland, he spent a number of years living with migrant workers in South Africa, studying patterns of exploita...

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Little Atoms
467: Beau Lotto's Deviate from 2017-06-13T10:00

Beau Lotto is Professor of Neuroscience at University of London Goldsmiths, and a visiting scholar at NYU, where he specialises in the biology and psychology of perception. He has conducted researc...

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Little Atoms
466: Hari Kunzru's White Tears from 2017-06-06T10:44:54

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men, and the story collection Noise. His latest novel is White Tears.


from 2017-05-23T10:00

This interview was first broadcast on 21 November 2008.Adam Curtis is a producer, writer and director of documentaries such as Bitter Lake, HyperNormalisation, The Century of the Self, and The Powe...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 464 - Natalie Haynes and The Children of Jocasta from 2017-05-16T12:14:47

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, which was shortlisted for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year award, and a non-fiction book about Ancient History, T...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 463: Phillip Lewis and The Barrowfields from 2017-05-09T09:48:45

Phillip Lewis was born and raised in a small town called West Jefferson in the mountains of North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later received a law degr...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 462: Mark O'Connell's To Be A Machine from 2017-05-03T10:26:33

Mark O'Connell is a writer based in Dublin. He is Slate’s books columnist, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” blog; his work has been publis...

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Little Atoms
461: Neil Wood's Good Cop Bad War from 2017-04-25T10:00

Neil Woods was an undercover cop whose brief was to infiltrate Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs. Starting out in the early 90s and making the rules up as he went, Neil was at the forefront of po...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 460: Wellcome Prize 2017 Special - 2 from 2017-04-18T09:35:50

The second of two episodes of Little Atoms with shortlisted writers for the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize. This week, Ed Yong on his book I Contain Multitudes, plus a repeat of our interview with the wi...

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Little Atoms
459: Wellcome Book Prize 2017 - Part one from 2017-04-11T10:00

The first of two episodes of Little Atoms with shortlisted writers for the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize. This week, Sarah Moss on her novel The Tidal Zone, David France of his history of AIDS How To Su...

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Little Atoms
From the Little Atoms archive: Sarah Churchwell's Careless People from 2017-04-04T09:49:04

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, writes regul...

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Little Atoms
From the archive – Noam Chomsky from 2017-03-28T10:05:10

In this episode of Little Atoms from 2009, Noam Chomsky examines the Obama administration and asks what has really changed.Chomsky describes the first term of the Bush administration as “off the sp...

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Little Atoms
458: George Saunders & Kathryn Hughes from 2017-03-21T11:00

458: George Saunders & Kathryn HughesGeorge Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (fo...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 457: Christine Negroni and the Crash Detectives from 2017-03-14T10:04:17

A journalist, aviation blogger, documentary producer and crash investigator, Christine Negroni has more than fifteen years' experience observing and participating in the international effort to cre...

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Little Atoms
456: Brenna Hassett's Built on Bones from 2017-03-07T11:00

Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist who specializes in using clues from the human skeleton to understand how people lived and died in the past. She has worked on excavation sites all over the world ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 455 - Mark Stevenson and Rory Clements from 2017-02-28T10:44:10

Mark Stevenson is a writer, broadcaster, futurologist and founder of The League of PragmaticOptimists. He has written for Radio 4, The Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and New Statesman,and is ...

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Little Atoms
454: Sheena Kamal & Kate Hamer from 2017-02-21T11:00

Sheena Kamal has been a stunt double (for children), a stand-in (most notably Archie Panjabi) and a film/TV extra. She has been a producer’s assistant and most recently, a researcher for a gritty T...

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Little Atoms
453: Cordelia Fine & Nichi Hodgson from 2017-02-14T11:00

Cordelia Fine is a Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of much-acclaimed A Mind of Its Own (Icon, 2006) and Delusions of Gender (Ico...

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Little Atoms
Two Cultures: The power in our genes from 2017-02-09T10:56:35

The third and final Little Atoms Two Cultures in Conversation events took place in London on 17 January 2017, when Little Atoms’ Neil Denny was joined by novelist Naomi Alderman and science writer ...

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Little Atoms
452: Olivia Laing & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro from 2017-02-07T11:00

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. Her work appears in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Frieze and New York Times. She's a Yaddo and MacDow...

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Little Atoms
451: Peter Swanson's Her Every Fear from 2017-01-31T10:56:12

Peter Swanson's debut novel, The Girl With a Clock for a Heart (2014), was described by Dennis Lehane as 'a twisty, sexy, electric thrill ride' and was nominated for the LA Times book award. His fo...

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Little Atoms
450: Chibundu Onuzo & Alexandra Kleeman from 2017-01-24T12:33:49

Chibundu Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1991. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 449 - Laura Cumming's Vanishing Man from 2017-01-17T11:00

Laura Cumming has been the art critic of the Observer since 1999. Previously, she was Arts Editor for the New Statesman, presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3, and arts producer at the BBC World S...

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Little Atoms
448: Luke Dormehl's Thinking Machines from 2017-01-10T11:00

Luke Dormehl is a journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film. He writes and has written for Fast Company, Wired, The Observer, Empire, SFX, The Sunday Times, Politico and ...

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Little Atoms
447: Michael Palin’s A Sackful of Limericks from 2016-12-20T11:00

Recorded live at Waterstones Piccadilly on 1 December 2016, here's the last Little Atoms of 2016. Neil Denny chats with comedy legend Michael Palin about his book A Sackful of Limericks, followed b...

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Little Atoms
446: Raoul Martinez's Creating Freedom from 2016-12-13T10:49:47

Raoul Martinez is a writer, artist, and award-winning filmmaker. Creating Freedom is his first book. It is informed by over a decade of research and is accompanied by a documentary series of the sa...

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Little Atoms
Something as Simple as a star with Simon Barraclough and Lucie Green from 2016-12-12T16:12:14

With performance, presentation, music and discussion, Lucie Green and Simon Barraclough look at the different ways of understanding "a thing so simple a thing as a star".Poet Simon Barraclough, who...

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Little Atoms
445: Helen Czerski's Storm in a Teacup from 2016-12-06T11:00

Helen Czerski is a lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. As a physicist she studies the bubbles underneath breaking waves in the open ocean to understand t...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 444: Tim Marshall on the Power and Politics of Flags from 2016-11-29T10:23:08

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign a­ffairs with more than 25 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN ra...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 443 - Adam Rutherford's Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived from 2016-11-22T10:49:35

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first g...

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Little Atoms
442 – Simon Ings' Stalin and The Scientists from 2016-11-15T11:00

Simon Ings began his career writing science fiction stories, novels and films, before widening his brief to explore perception (The Eye), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the ...

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Little Atoms
401 – Hadley Freeman's Life Moves Pretty Fast from 2016-11-08T11:00

Recorded live at the first London Podcast Festival at King’s Place, Guardian writer Hadley Freeman brings us her personalised guide to American movies from the 1980s – why they are brilliant, what ...

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Little Atoms
440 – Naomi Alderman and Petina Gappah from 2016-11-01T11:00

Naomi Alderman is the author of four novels. In 2006 she won the Orange Award for New Writers, and in 2007 she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, as well as being selected as one of W...

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Little Atoms
239 – Mike Massimino's Spaceman from 2016-10-25T10:00

Mike Massimino served as an astronaut for NASA between 1996 and 2014, going on two Space Shuttle missions to service the Hubble telescope, spending more than 30 hours on spacewalks. He has appeared...

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Little Atoms
438 – Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal or, Whatever Happened to The Party of The People from 2016-10-18T10:00

Thomas Frank is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's and a regular contributor to Th...

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Little Atoms
437 – Mark Greif's Against Everything from 2016-10-11T10:00

Mark Greif studied history and literature at Harvard, and English at Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar. In 2004, he co-founded the literary journal n+1 in New York and has been a principal at th...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 436 - Colonel Alfred “Al” Worden from 2016-10-04T10:00

After graduating from West Point with a degree in Military Science, and from The University of Michigan with a Masters in Astronautical/Aeronautical Engineering, Colonel Alfred “Al” Worden had a ca...

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Little Atoms
From the archive: Nick Cohen's What's Left? from 2016-09-28T08:31:21

In this interview from 2007, Neil and Padraig talked to journalist Nick Cohen about his book What's Left?, which examines the ideas of the British far left and their effects on mainstream politics....

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Little Atoms
Francis Wheen - Strange Days Indeed from 2016-09-21T09:46:32

First broadcast 11 September 2009, Francis Wheen discusses Strange Days Indeed, his brilliant book on the mad, paranoid world of 70s politics.


Se...

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Little Atoms
Francis Spufford - Red Plenty from 2016-09-14T08:29:20

First broadcast on 14th January 2011Hailed as one of the most original non-fiction books in recent years, Francis Spufford's Red Plenty tells the story of the men and women who strived to deliver t...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 435 - Mary Roach and the science of humans at war from 2016-09-07T08:10:28

Mary Roach is the New York Times bestselling author of several popular science books, including Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Packing for Mars and Gulp. She has written for the Guardian, Wired, BBC Focus, GQ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 434 - Science and the City with Laurie Winkless from 2016-08-24T09:52:51

Laurie Winkless is a physicist and writer, currently based in London. Following a degree at Trinity College Dublin, a placement at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre, and a masters in Space Science at UCL...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 433 - Travis Elborough’s Walk In The Park from 2016-08-17T10:00

Travis Elborough is the author of four acclaimed books: The Bus We Loved, a history of the Routemaster bus; The Long Player Goodbye, which lamented the passing of vinyl; Wish You Were Here, a histo...

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Little Atoms
432 - Alex Cox's Introduction to Film from 2016-08-10T10:00

Maverick British filmmaker Alex Cox is responsible for directing a host of acclaimed films including Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Straight to Hell, Walker and Highway Patrolman. From 1987 to 1994, he pre...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 431 - Dan Richards and Cal Flyn from 2016-08-03T09:50:03

Cal Flyn is a freelance journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. She has been a reporter for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. She has been...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 430 - Alex Marshall’s Republic or Death from 2016-07-27T10:00

Alex Marshall is a journalist who writes about music and politics. He has written previously for the BBC, Guardian and New York Times. Alex is the author of Republic or Death! Travels in Search of ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 429 - Miranda Sawyer's Out Of Time from 2016-07-20T09:55:02

Miranda Sawyer is a journalist and broadcaster. Formerly of Smash Hits and Select, she currently writes features and radio criticism for the Observer, and her writing has also appeared in GQ, Vogue...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 428 - Marcus Du Sautoy's What We Cannot Know from 2016-07-13T10:00

Marcus Du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 2008 he was appointed to Oxford University’s prestigious professorship as the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 427 - Louise Dougty's Black Water from 2016-07-06T08:58:57

Louise Doughty is the author of seven novels, most recently the top 5 bestseller Apple Tree Yard, which was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club, shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awa...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 426 - Francis Spufford's Golden Hill from 2016-06-29T10:00:38

Francis Spufford was born in 1964. He is the author of five highly-praised books of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either 'bizarre' or 'brilliant', and usually as both. Unap...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 425 - Kate Moore's Radium Girls from 2016-06-22T09:50:18

Kate Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling writer with more than a decade's experience in writing across varying genres, including memoir and biography and history. She is the author of The Radium Gi...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 424 - John Wray's Lost Time Accidents from 2016-06-14T23:00

John Wray is the author of The Right Hand of Sleep, which won a Whiting Writers' Award, Canaan's Tongue and the critically-acclaimed Lowboy. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Nov...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 423 - Eagles of podcasting! from 2016-06-08T10:02:36

Recorded live at the Stoke Newington Literary festival, we gathered together the crème of UK literary podcasting and put them on the same stage, and inevitably they talked about books; With Andy Mi...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 422 - Lucy Jones and Foxes Unearthed from 2016-06-01T10:00

Lucy Jones is a nature writer and journalist based in London. She was Deputy Editor at NME.com and previously worked at the Daily Telegraph. Her writing on culture, science and nature has been publ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 421 - Sean Carroll and the Big Picture from 2016-05-25T10:00

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, where he researches the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He received...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 420 - Katie Roiphe's Violet Hour from 2016-05-18T10:00

Katie Roiphe is the author of several books, including The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, Uncommon Arrangements, and In Praise of Messy Lives. Her articles have appeared in The New York Tim...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 419 - Duncan Campbell's We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds! from 2016-05-11T10:00

Duncan Campbell is a former crime correspondent of the Guardian, former chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association and winner of the Bar Council’s newspaper journalist of the year. He has also wr...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 418 - Rowan Moore's Slow Burn City from 2016-05-04T10:16:08

Rowan Moore is the architecture critic for the Observer and previously for the Evening Standard. He is also a trained architect, and between 2002 and 2008 was the Director of the Architecture Found...

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Little Atoms
London election special #3 - housing from 2016-05-03T12:08:05

Josh Neicho speaks to Ben Judah, Heather Kennedy and Martin Skinner about housing, the hottest issue of the London mayoral campaign.Ben Judah is a journalist and author of This Is London, about the...

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Little Atoms
London election special #2 - Youth, diversity and equality from 2016-04-28T09:48:35

In our second London mayoral election special, Josh Niecho and his panel discuss the issues affecting London's young and diverse community.Featuring:Kenny Imafidon is author of the award-winning Ke...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 417 - Stephen Trombley's Wise Words from 2016-04-27T09:51:13

Stephen Trombley's most recent books are Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World (2012) and A Short History of Western Thought (2011). For 15 years he co-edited The Fontana Dictionary of Modern ...

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Little Atoms
London election special part 1 - transport infrastructure and environment from 2016-04-26T12:47:11

Alexander Jan leads the City Economics team at engineering and consultancy firm Arup and is a columnist for City AMAlex Ingram is a cycling campaigner with groups in Lewisham and Islington and with...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 416 - Steve Silberman and Sarah Moss from 2016-04-22T12:00

The last of our three shows for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize, with shortlisted authors Steve Silberman & Sarah Moss. The Wellcome Book Prize 2016 winner will be announced on Monday 25th April. Than...

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Little Atoms 415 - Suzanne O'Sullivan and Amy Liptrot from 2016-04-20T09:59:45

Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, first working at The Royal London Hospital and now as a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at The National Hos...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 414 - Cathy Rentzenbrink & Alex Pheby from 2016-04-13T11:14:45

The first of three shows for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize, with shortlisted authors Cathy Rentzenbrink & Alex Pheby.Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, Grew up in Yorkshire and now lives in Lo...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 413 - Molly Crabapple and Paul Mason from 2016-04-06T09:55:34

A recording of the first Little Atoms live event at Waterstones Piccadilly in which we host the launch of Mollly Crabapple’s book Drawing Blood. An acclaimed artist and journalist whose work has ap...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 412 - The Penderyn Music Book Prize special from 2016-03-30T10:07:54

The Penderyn Music Book Prize is organised by Richard Thomas, founder of the Laugharne Weekend Festival, and is the only UK-based book prize specifically for music titles including history, theory,...

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Little Atoms
Littlle Atoms 411 - Ioan Grillo and Gangster Warlords from 2016-03-23T11:24:52

Ioan Grillo has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media including Time magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle, the BBC World Service and the Sunday...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 410 - DJ Taylor and The Prose Factory from 2016-03-16T11:06:13

DJ Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. He has written eleven novels, the most recent being ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms special: Andrew Solomon and Marion Coutts from 2016-03-11T18:38:46

For the last two years Little Atoms has partnered with the Wellcome Book Prize, broadcasting interviews with the shortlisted authors. We’ll be doing the same this year, and to mark the announcement...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 409 Harry Parker Andrew Hankinson from 2016-03-09T11:00:45

Harry Parker grew up in Wiltshire. He was educated at Falmouth College of Art and University College London. He joined the British Army when he was 23 and served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 408 - Jo Marchant and the science of mind over body from 2016-03-02T10:58:59

Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist based in London. She has a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London, and an MSc in Scienc...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 407: Maria Konnikova and The Confidence Game from 2016-02-24T10:28:29

Maria Konnikova was born in Moscow, Russia and came to the United States when she was four years old. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a regular column with a focus...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 406 - Kathryn Harkup and A is for Arsenic from 2016-02-17T11:00:09

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a PhD then a postdoc at the University of York before realising that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than spen...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 405 - Helen Fitzgerald's Viral from 2016-02-10T10:56:32

Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely (2007) and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including My Last Confession (2009), The Donor (2011) and most recently The Cry (201...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 310 – Matthew Kneale & Suzanne Moore from 2016-02-05T10:32:15

Matthew Kneale studied Modern History at Oxford University. He is the author of several novels, including English Passengers which won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 311 – Philip Hoare & Deborah Orr from 2016-02-04T12:37:22

Philip Hoare is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed biography of Noel Coward, and Leviathan or, The Whale, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 316 – Rana Dasgupta & Sarah Ditum from 2016-02-03T12:28:41

Rana Dasgupta won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for t...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 404 - The Ministry of Nostalgia and Landscapes of Communism from 2016-02-03T11:00

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review,Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 312 – Is Music Journalism in a Critical Condition? from 2016-02-02T10:53:41

A special edition of Little Atoms for Resonance FM’s fundraising week. Recorded live at The Slaughtered Lamb on 10th February 2014.Is Music Journalism in a Critical Condition?The UK music scene onc...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 304 – Aleks Krotoski & Matthew Sweet from 2016-02-01T15:20:30

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London S...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 319 – FutureEverything 2014 – James Bridle & Eleanor Saitta from 2016-01-29T14:11:21

James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Do...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 322 – Irving Finkel & Lucianne Walkowicz from 2016-01-28T14:28:32

Irving Finkel is an archaeologist and Assyriologist, currently Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 323 – FutureEverything – 65daysofstatic & The Space Lady from 2016-01-27T14:27:14

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 403 - Tim Baker's Fever City from 2016-01-27T11:10

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He late...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 325 – FutureEverything 2014 – Alex Fleetwood & Anab Jain from 2016-01-26T16:13:42

Alex Fleetwood is the founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. Hide&Seek started life in 2007 as a festival of social games and playful expe...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 336 – Olivia Laing & The Trip to Echo Spring from 2016-01-25T13:23:24

Olivia Laing‘s first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and t...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 340 – Andy Miller & The Year of Reading Dangerously from 2016-01-22T13:29:20

Andy Miller is a reader, author and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Esquire and Mojo. He’s the author of Tiltin...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 341 – Cara Hoffman & Be Safe I Love You from 2016-01-21T12:22:10

Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed 2011 novel So Much Pretty. She grew up in northern Appalachia, where she dropped out of high school to work full time. Hoffman spent three yea...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 402: Lisa Randall and Francesca Kay from 2016-01-20T10:59:01

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Neil Denny talks to Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall about her new book Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs, and then Francesca Kay on her latest novel The Long Roo...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 343 – Lee Rourke & Vulgar Things from 2016-01-19T16:57:29

Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday, and the novel The Canal, which won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2010. He is writer in residence at Kingston University, wh...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 401 - Kat Arney Herding Hemingway's Cats from 2016-01-13T11:00

Following a doctorate and subsequent research career in genetics, Kat Arney is now Science Communications Manager for Cancer Research UK, where she translates science into plain English to help peo...

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Little Atoms
From the archive - Christopher Hitchens from 2016-01-06T09:36:28

In this interview, recorded in Oxford ahead of the release of "God Is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens spoke to Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy about Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, religion, blasphemy an...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 400 - Juliet Jacques from 2015-12-16T10:26:28

Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer, best known for the Guardian’s “Transgender Journey”—the first time the gender reassignment process had been serialised for a major British publication. Her col...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 399 - Lucy Inglis and Georgian London from 2015-12-09T10:59:33

Lucy Inglis is a historian, novelist, and occasional television presenter. In 2009 she created the Georgian London blog, which became the largest free body of work on the eighteenth century city on...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 398. Peter Pomerantsev - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible from 2015-12-02T11:00

Peter Pomerantsev is an award-winning TV producer and a contributor to the London Review of Books. His writing has been published in the Financial Times,New Yorker,Wall Street Journal,Foreign Polic...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 397 - Jon Savage - 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded from 2015-11-18T11:00

Jon Savage is the author of England's Dreaming: Sex pistols and Punk Rock and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875 - 1945. He is the writer of the award winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein...

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Little Atoms
Litle Atoms 396 Max Porter: Grief Is The Thing With Feathers from 2015-11-11T11:00

Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta. His first book Grief is the Thing With Feathers has been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2015 and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2015. Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 395 – Hanya Yanagihara & Antony Loewenstein from 2015-11-05T14:36:30

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Man Booker shortlisted novelist Hanya Yanagihara on A Little Life and journalist Antony Loewenstein on Disaster Capitalism.Hanya Yanagihara is the author of The...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 394 – Zoe Lambert & Emma Jane Unsworth Little Atoms Live from 2015-10-07T10:00:17

This week, a Live Little Atoms event. Authors Emma Jane Unsworth and Zoe Lambert in conversation with Neil Denny at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on Friday 25th Septemb...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 393 – Timothy Snyder & Black Earth from 2015-09-30T10:00:20

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history: Blood...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 392 – Royal Society Winton Prize 2015 Three from 2015-09-23T10:00:26

The last of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, ahead of the award ceremony on Thursday 24th September. This week Neil Denny ta...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 391 – Royal Society Winton Prize 2015 Two from 2015-09-16T10:00:55

The second of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. This week Neil Denny talks with David Adam, and there’s a repeat of our inter...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 390 – Royal Society Winton Prize 2015 One from 2015-09-09T10:00:01

The first of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. This week Neil Denny talks with shortlisted authors Jim Al-Khalili & Johnj...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 389 – Petina Gappah & The Book of Memory from 2015-09-02T10:00:18

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 388 – John Higgs & Stranger Than We Can Imagine from 2015-08-26T10:00:31

John Higgs is the author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, and the novel The Brandy of the Damned. His latest ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 387 – Michela Wrong & Borderlines from 2015-08-19T10:00:50

Michela Wrong is a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. She w...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 386 – Stephen Grey & Dan Richards from 2015-08-12T10:00:08

Stephen Grey is a journalist based in London, who writes mainly about national security issues. He is best known for breaking the international exclusive story of the CIA’s secret rendition p...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 385 – Alok Jha & The Water Book from 2015-08-05T10:00:57

Alok Jha is a journalist and broadcaster based in London. He is science correspondent for ITN and, before that, was science correspondent at the Guardian. He has presented science programmes for BB...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 384 – Helen Scales & Spirals in Time from 2015-07-29T10:30:02

Helen Scales is a marine biologist, a freelance researcher and broadcaster; she appears regularly on BBC Radio 4, Sky News and the BBC World Service, and has presented documentaries on topics such ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 383 – Iain Sinclair – London Overground & Black Apples of Gower from 2015-07-22T10:30:13

Iain Sinclair a poet, film-maker, essayist and the author of many acclaimed books, including Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital,...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 382 – Antony Beevor & Ardennes 1944 from 2015-07-15T10:30:38

Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, where he studied under John Keegan. A regular officer with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army to write. He has published four novels, and num...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 381 – Dylan Evans & Andrew Mueller from 2015-07-08T10:00:45

On this week’s Little Atoms, Dylan Evans on The Utopia Experiment, and Andrew Mueller on his memoir It’s Too Late to Die Young Now. Dylan Evans is an academic, philosopher and journalist. He ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 380 – Nell Zink & The Wallcreeper and Mislaid from 2015-07-01T10:30:25

Nell Zink was born in 1964 in southern California and grew up in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she majored in philosophy. Rather late in...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 379 – Emma Jane Unsworth & Alex Hourston from 2015-06-24T10:15:50

Emma Jane Unsworth is a journalist and won the Betty Trask Award for her novel Hungry, the Stars and Everything, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Portico Prize. Her short story ‘I Arrive Firs...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 378 – Nick Lane & The Vital Question from 2015-06-17T10:30:03

Nick Lane is a biochemist in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London and leads the UCL Origins of Life Programme. His first book, Oxygen, was one of the S...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 377 – Joanna Biggs & Stevan Alcock from 2015-06-10T10:30:13

On this week's Little Atoms Podcast, Joanna Biggs on her book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, and Stevan Alcock on his novel Blood Relatives.Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 376 – Gavin Francis & Adventures in Human Being from 2015-06-03T10:30:14

On this week's Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to Dr Gavin Francis about his latest book is Adventures in Human Being. Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 375 – Lynsey Addario & It’s What I Do from 2015-05-20T10:30:54

On this week's Little Atoms, Pulitzer Prize-winning Photojournalist Lynsey Addario on her Memoir It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 374 – Brandy Schillace & Caitlin Doughty from 2015-05-13T10:30:23

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, two books about Death. Brandy Schillace on Death’s Summer Coat, and Caitlin Doughty on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Dr Brandy Schillace writes about culture, the hi...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 373 – Zoe Williams & Get it Together from 2015-05-06T10:30:14

The day before the most uninspiring General Election in Decades, we talk to Zoe Williams about her new book Get it Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics.Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 372 – Wellcome Book Prize 2105 Part Two from 2015-04-29T10:30:01

Neil Denny talks to two more shortlisted writers, Henry Marsh and Marion Coutts.


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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 371 – Wellcome Book Prize 2015 Part One from 2015-04-22T10:00:37

On Wednesday 29th April the winner of the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize will be announced. In the first of two special editions of Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to three of the shortlisted writers. Thi...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 370 – Christopher Bollen & Orient from 2015-04-15T10:00:32

On this week's Little Atoms, Neil Denny talks to New York writer Christopher Bollen about his new novel Orient. Listen

Little Atoms
Little Atoms 369 – Susan Pinker & Gary Wilson from 2015-04-08T10:00:01

On this week’s Little Atoms, Susan Pinker on her book The Village Effect, and Gary Wilson on his book Your Brain on Porn. Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist and award-winning newspa...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 368 – Andrew Scull & Madness in Civilization from 2015-04-01T10:00:27

Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego. He has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton. His many ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 367 – Mind’s Eye Interviews Five – Dennis Reuter from 2015-03-25T09:30:25

Dr. Dennis Reuter is a New Horizons co-investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the instrument scientist for Ralph, the New Horizons color imager and infrared spectrometer. New Horiz...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 366 – Hannah Fry & Jon Ronson from 2015-03-18T09:30:44

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Hannah Fry on The Mathematics of Love and Jon Ronson on his latest book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Dr. Hannah Fry is a mathematician and complexity scienti...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 365 – Salena Godden & Kate Hamer from 2015-03-11T09:30:42

On this week’s Little Atoms, two interviews. Neil Denny talks to Salena Godden about her memoir Springfield Road, and to Kate Hamer about her debut novel The Girl in the Red Coat. Salena Godd...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 364 – FutureEverything 20 Special from 2015-03-04T09:30:15

This week’s Little Atoms is a special edition recorded at FutureEverything 20 in Manchester on 26th and 27th February 2015. The show features a long interview recorded live in front of an audience ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 363 – Arthur I. Miller & Colliding Worlds from 2015-02-25T09:30:36

Arthur I. Miller is emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Einstein, Picasso, which was nominat...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 362 – Mind’s Eye Interviews Four from 2015-02-18T10:30:16

Late last year, Little Atoms took part in an audio installation, Mind’s Eye, which consisted of a number of interviews with scientists involved in current space missions. Mind’s Eye is now on tour,...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 361 – Greg Jenner & A Million Years in a Day from 2015-02-11T12:50:08

Greg Jenner is the Historical Consultant to CBBC’s multi-award winning Horrible Histories, Horrible Histories with Stephen Fry, and the various HH spin-offs. As well as contributing sketches ...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 360 – David Stubbs & Future Days from 2015-02-04T11:00:44

David Stubbs joined the music magazine Melody Maker in 1986, where he worked for 12 years. His most famous creation, Mr Agreeable periodically reawakens over at The Quietus. He has also written for...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 359 – Edward Slingerland & Trying Not to Try from 2015-01-28T11:00:54

Edward Slingerland is an internationally recognized expert in both early Chinese thought and the links between cognitive science and the humanities. He is Professor of Asian Studies, Associate Memb...

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Little Atoms 358 – Johann Hari & Chasing the Scream from 2015-01-21T11:00:45

Johann Hari is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the LA Times, the Guardian,Le Monde, Slate, the New Republic and The Nation among others. He was a columnist on the Independent f...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 357 – Ken Hollings & The Bright Labyrinth from 2015-01-14T11:00:13

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Blast and Nude, and in the a...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 356 – A QI Christmas Show from 2014-12-17T11:00:12

The last Little Atoms of 2014, recorded at QI headquarters in somewhere in Covent Garden, with QI Head of Research James Harkin and the QI Elves – Anne Miller, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 355 – Celeste Ng & Ben Okri from 2014-12-10T10:00:39

In this episode of Little Atoms, two prize-winning novelists. Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Her fiction and essays have appear...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 354 – Ben Goldacre & Eric Schlosser from 2014-11-26T10:30:35

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, academic, broadcaster and science writer who has made his name unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims from journalists, politicians, quacks and drug companies. His Bad...

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Little Atoms 353 – Rebecca Newberger Goldstein & Kenan Malik from 2014-11-19T11:00:18

In this episode of Little Atoms, two philosophical interviews: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University. Her award-winning books include the novels...

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Little Atoms 352 – David Flusfeder & Jeff Jackson from 2014-11-12T18:11:49

In this episode of Little Atoms, two novels that blur the boundaries between truth and Fiction. David Flusfeder was born in New Jersey but grew up in London. He’s the author of numerous novel...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 351 – Michael Brooks & At The Edge of Uncertainty from 2014-11-05T10:00:41

Michael Brooks is the author of the bestselling non-fiction titles 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense and Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. He holds a PhD in quantum physics, is a co...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 350 – Marina Keegan & The Opposite of Loneliness from 2014-10-29T10:00:03

Marina Keegan (1989 – 2012) was an author, journalist, playwright, poet, actress and activist, and for two years a research assistant to Harold Bloom, all before she graduated from Yale in Ma...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 349 – Travis Elborough & London Bridge + How We Used to Live from 2014-10-22T10:00:25

Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author and cultural commentator for more than a decade now. His books include The Bus We Loved, a history of the Routemaster bus; The Long Player Goodb...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 348 – Rachel Cooke & Her Brilliant Career from 2014-10-15T10:00:48

Rachel Cooke is a journalist, writing for The Observer, where her features and interviews have won several awards. She is also the television critic of the New Statesman. Her first book is Her Bril...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 347 – James Ward & Adventures in Stationery from 2014-10-08T10:00:56

James Ward‘s blog, I Like Boring Things, has featured in the Independent, Observer and on the BBC website. He is co-founder of Stationery Club and London’s annual Boring Conference, a o...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 346 – Mind’s Eye Interviews Three from 2014-10-03T17:38:56

The last of three special editions of Little Atoms from Mind’s Eye, an audio installation at Brighton Digital Festival, featuring a number of interviews with space people. The third show feat...

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Little Atoms
Little Atoms 345 – Mind’s Eye Interviews Two from 2014-09-24T10:00:17

The  second of three special editions of Little Atoms from Mind’s Eye, an audio installation at Brighton Digital Festival, featuring a number of interviews with space people. The second show ...

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