In Conversation

Paul Pickering is the author of eight novels: Wild About Harry (Weidenfeld & Nicholson / Athenaeum 1985), Perfect English (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1986), The Blue Gate of Babylon (Chatto and Windus / Random House US 1989), Charlie Peace (Random House 1991), The Leopard’s Wife (Simon & Schuster UK and US 2010), Over the Rainbow (Simon & Schuster 2014), Elephant (Salt 2021), and Lucy (Salt 2024). The Blue Gate of Babylon was a notable book of the year in the New York Times, who

Philipp Sarasin is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and one of the foremost scholars of Michel Foucault in the German-speaking world. Among his many publications are Darwin und Foucault. Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie (Darwin and Foucault. Genealogy and History in the Age of Biology, Suhrkamp 2009), and Michel Foucault zur Einführung (An Introduction to Michel Foucault, Junius 2016), the influential standard introduction to

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic whose work blurs the line between historical inquiry and literary imagination. Best known for her fiction set in Renaissance Italy, she gives voice to women whose lives have been obscured by time, deftly merging narrative and historicism. Rendering the past not as backdrop but as pulse, Dunant allows history to unfold with the texture of lived experience. Her acclaimed novels, The Birth of Venus (Random House 2004),

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Allen Lane 2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the ri

Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including Contesting Democracy (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian , The New York Times , and Project Syndicate . This interview was conducted o

Soheila Sokhanvari is a British-Iranian artist whose diverse practice delves into the complexities of identity, politics, and social...

Abdelkhalig Shaib is a Sudanese attorney and member of the American and New York Bar Associations, who specializes in constitutionalism...

Yasmin Ullah is a Rohingya author, poet, and human rights activist based in Canada. Born in the North Arakan state of Myanmar/Burma, she...