Little Atoms

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 Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport, among others. His latest book is The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 years travelling and working as an agricultural labourer in Europe and the Middle East. She returned to the US, had a baby and found a job delivering newspapers which eventually led to work as a reporter covering environmental politics and crime. She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford, where she lectured on Violence and Masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. Hoffman lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College. Cara ‘s latest novel is Be Safe I Love You. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Room.Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards and honours and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the author of numerous books including Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe. Her latest book is Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.Francesca Kay's first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers and was nominated for the Authors' Club First Novel Award and for Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe and South Asia Region). Her second novel, The Translation of the Bones, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is The Long Room. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, where he is an MFA lecturer in creative writing and critical theory. He also lectures in creative writing at the University of East London. His latest novel is Vulgar Things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 people understand more about the disease. Kat is also a science writer and broadcaster, whose writing has appeared in the Guardian, Science, New Scientist, BBC Online and Al-Jazeera Online.She has presented several BBC Radio 4 science documentaries and programmes in the Costing the Earth series, is a regular presenter with the Naked Scientists, and presents and produces the Naked Genetics monthly podcast. Kat’s first book is Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 and nuclear apocalypse Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 column was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011. She was included in the Independent’s Pink List for the last four years, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. She has also written for Granta, TimeOut, Filmwaves, 3am, the London Review of Books, the New Humanist, the New Inquiry, and many other publications. She is the author of Trans: A Memoir. This is the 400th edition of Little Atoms, and Neil is joined by former host Becky Hogge in conversation with Juliet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 online, which became a book, Georgian London: Into the Streets. She’s currently working on a book about Opium. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Policy,Daily Beast, Newsweek,Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. He has also worked as a consultant for the EU and World Bank. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Story (1998) and Joy Division (2007) as well as the feature film of Teenage (2014). His latest book is 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.