A.S. Byatt’s highbrow fiction has a vast, international appeal. The writer, who died in November, was known for her voracious appetite for knowledge and her insatiable curiosity. Inspiration for her work draws from as diverse sources as Elizabeth I, Norse mythology, Amazonian butterflies and Matisse’s paintings. And she turned her hand to many different styles, from Victorian poetry to fairy tales. In their statement about Byatt’s death, her publisher, Penguin, called her “a girl from Sheffield with a strong European sensibility”. That European sensibility is evident in her writing and intervi ..read more

One of the most captivating and enigmatic novelists of the 20th century, Bernice Rubens remains largely unknown despite her remarkable literary achievements. She was the second recipient of the Booker prize in 1970 for her novel The Elected Member and its first female winner. She remains the only Welsh winner in the history of the prize – a fact that perhaps speaks volumes for the way Welsh writing in the English language is perceived and recognised outside of Wales. Rubens was born in the working class area of Adamsdown in Cardiff in 1923, to Polish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She atten ..read more

From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 26. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo Chetna Maroo’s subtle novel follows a British Asian girl, Gopi, who plays squash fiercely to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. In Western Lane, the squash court becomes an arena for playing out the conflicting emotions flowing between a grieving father and his daughters. Here other tensions also come to the fore, such as her father’s memories of Mombasa in Kenya, the delicate negotiati ..read more

Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction. zef art/Shutterstock Wales has sought to rediscover its identity and autonomy since the devolution referendum of 1997. Authors and publishers have embraced the gothic genre as a means of exploring Welsh language, culture and heritage – reflecting on the anxieties Welsh society has experienced since becoming a devolved nation. Halloween (or Nos Galan Gaeaf, as we say in Wales) presents the perfect opportunity for us to explore these social tensions through the macabre. Here are five eerie works of Welsh literature for you to catch up wit ..read more

Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw and Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke in the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch (1994) IMDB In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature. Middlemarch (1872) is a slow read and a deeply immersive one. George Eliot – the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) – built rich and complex fictional worlds that she hoped would allow readers to be “better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures”. This avowedly humanist world-buil ..read more

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4 – Robert Thew and Henry Fuseli (1796). Wikimedia Commons. A speech in a play by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries can be as short as a word or as long as several hundred, or anything in between. But what is the most common length? There is an interesting new story emerging about the lengths of speeches in early modern plays. Staying away from Shakespeare himself for a moment, we can take Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (1607) and count the number of speeches and their lengths. The most common length is four words. In the first scene of the play, Volpone asks if an enter ..read more

Shutterstock In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), the trees sing. Sometimes the sound is like a Gregorian chant, a threnody from the rustling leaves, the creaking boughs, the undulations of limbs heavy with leaves, swaying in the wind that rushes through the woods of Dorset’s Little Hintock. At other times, it is a low moan, a cry of pain, voiced as if in sympathy with the tragic plight of the characters who wander through these woods, searching for something lost or never quite possessed – for a Hardyian character is always driven by a restive compulsion to move. Even in stillness, Hard ..read more

Stories about witches are having a resurgence. Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock From the fairy tales read to us as children to the costumes every Halloween, the figure of the witch has been with most of us for our entire lives. Unkempt and warty, the witch of our childhood was generally a repulsive creature flying on a broomstick beside her toad or black cat. Yet recent years have marked a reinvention of this ancient character, giving her a modern twist in a new subgenre of literature that some are calling “witch lit”. The novels that have been categorised as belonging to this new subgenre often ta ..read more

Wilkie Collins photographed in 1874. Wikimedia Commons Wilkie Collins had the longest writing career of any major mid-19th-century English novelist, writing short stories and novels from 1844 to 1889. Literary criticism, however, has traditionally seen him as only notable for his two mystery novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). While these are some of the century’s earliest, and best mysteries, praising only them ignores the social and political themes common in Collins’s work, especially his later novels. The favouring of the mysteries even started with Charles Dickens ..read more

Markus Gjengaar/Unsplash Lessons is Ian McEwan’s most autobiographical novel to date. It is the story of a man’s life, but it is also the story of a man making his life into a story. It exemplifies the risks and rewards of living a life shaped from within by the logic of literature. Lessons – Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape). Anyone familiar with McEwan’s extensive, award-winning oeuvre will know that his resort to personal material is not for lack of imagination. He is, by any standard, a master of style and invention. It is hard to class his novels within a genre because he has forged his own – o ..read more