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I wrote about Olga Tokarczuk’s oddly - but I think deliberately - off-kilter novel The Empusium for Guardian Books. Warning: contains sperm-squirting parasites. theguardian.com/books/2024/oct…

The end of an era. Raising a glass to the passion & expert brilliance of the team behind Open Book BBC Radio 4 Chris Power @johnypitts octavia bright Elizabeth Day Mariella Frostrup Kirsten Locke Nicola Holloway Allegra McIlroy Belinda Naylor Emma Wallace Rick Woska Di Speirs et al 4pm today

Farewell, Open Book - thank you for the memories and the TBR pile. Congratulations Di Speirs Kirsten Locke Belinda Naylor for making such a brilliant and erudite programme. We will miss you.

Great remembrance of Paul Bailey by Leo Robson in the The New Statesman newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

Writing: never entirely pleasant and no end to it, fortunately. Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album

"In many ways Lowry is closer to Melville and Conrad than Joyce, but he creates his corner of Mexico in a manner similar to the Dublin of Ulysses: not by describing it so much as by building an alternate reality from language." theguardian.com/books/2011/nov…

I wrote about Hanif Kureishi and his extraordinary memoir for the The New Statesman newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

Out today: the first English-language collected edition of Roberto Bolaño’s brilliant, mysterious, endlessly rewarding short stories. It was an honour and a joy to write the introduction.

Having been told more than once over the last couple of years that I’m young for a cancer patient, it’s nice to hear that according to Private Eye I’m also young to be the presenter of a books programme on Radio 4. The secret of youth: do/get stuff mostly older people do/get.

When the person who enabled me to read Septology speaks, I listen

My daughter wrote a haiku with the same plot as at least 3 Jon Fosse novels

‘Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired an "exciting" new trilogy by Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse, set in a fictional fishing village in western Norway.’ Wonderful news. I’ll go back to a Norwegian fishing village as many times as Fosse will send me there.

In 2025 I’ve decided to just read

Can we please talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s incredible cat?

Phenomenal writing advice from Anne Carson

I wrote a little bit about fictional approaches to death, via Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening, for the Guardian theguardian.com/books/2024/dec…