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Newly minted Booker winner M John Harrison talks about his surprise, and shock, at bagging the honour after over six decades of writing

M John Harrison is genre defying British author and literary critic hailed by writers including Olivia Lange and Robert Macfarlane as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today. Harrison sold his first story in 1965 and in 1969 joined the staff of the UK Speculative Fiction magazine New Worlds, where he edited the books page until 1978. His works include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989, Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for Innovation in Fiction.In this episode of TOI Bookmark, Harrison discusses his latest book The End of Everything, a 2026 post-apocalyptic novel that was shortlisted for the The Booker Prize.

Natasha Walter is a British feminist writer and a human rights activist and the founder of the charity Women for Refugee Women, which works with women who have sought asylum in the UK. Walter has also worked as a journalist for The Guardian and The Observer and taught as a visiting professor of Women Rights at Cambridge University and junior teaching fellow at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.Walter’s has authored several books on feminism, including titles such as Before the Light Fades: A Family Story of Resistance, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, and The New Feminism. In this episode of TOI Bookmark, Walter discusses her latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire.

Omair Ahmad is the author of ‘Encounters’, ‘The Storyteller's Tale’, ‘Tall Tales by a Small Dog’, ‘The Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys Into Bhutan’ and ‘Jimmy, The Terrorist’, which won the Crossword Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. He is also a prominent columnist and a political and social commentator. In this conversation, he discusses his latest novel, ‘Homecoming’.  

Samanth Subramanian is a writer and journalist based in London, where he is the acting managing editor of Equator. Subramanian also writes for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and The Guardian, among other publications. His last book A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane was one of the New York Times top 100 books of 2020. His second book This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan Civil War was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.In this episode of TOI Bookmark, Subramanian discusses his latest book, The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect Our World, which describes the subsea cable network that brings us the Internet, the people who lay these cables and the people who wish to control them.

Jenny Niven is CEO and director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was founder and director of Push the Boat Out, a festival of poetry, spoken word and language; head of literature, publishing and languages at Creative Scotland, and executive producer of the Edinburgh International Cultural Summit. She has been on the founding board of the Stella Prize for Australian Women's Writing, head of programme at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne, and she co-founded and ran Beijing's first book festival from 2004 to 2010.

Neil D’Silva is a prolific author but best known for his horror writing, including popular titles like Maya's New Husband, Yakshini Sapna's Bad Connection, Dev Putra, and Ghost Whispers. D’Silva has played a key role in shaping India’s horror literature landscape, having served as president of the Indian chapter of the Horror Writers association and jury chair in the short stories category of the Bram Stoker Awards. A passionate advocate for India's folklore and paranormal horror literature, Neil has also delivered talks on the TEDx platform. He is a mentor with the Scholastic Writers Academy. In this episode of TOI Bookmark his writing, with a focus on his latest works The Curse of the Maharani published by Rupa Publications, and The Haunted Doorway, which has been co-authored with Jay Alani and published by HarperCollins India.

Mahmood Farooqui is an acclaimed writer and performer known for reviving Dastangoi, the lost art of Urdu storytelling. He has received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Besieged: Voices From Delhi-1857. He has been visiting fellow at the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley. Mahmood has co-directed Peepli Live and produced The Great Shamsuddin Family.  In this conversation, he discusses 'The Tihar Players'.

Professor Munis D Faruqui is a historian in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Princes of the Mughal Empire 1504-1790 and the co-editor of several influential volumes including Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History and Religious Interactions in Mughal India.In this episode of TOI Bookmark, Faruqui discusses his recent book Aurangzeb 'Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold.

Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal trilogy: 'A Golden Age', 'The Good Muslim' and 'The Bones of Grace'. She is the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the O Henry Award. 'Garments' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. She was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, she trained as an anthropologist at Harvard University and now lives in London. In this conversation, she discusses her novel, 'Uprising'.