Malala Yousafzai
Activist
I have loved going to the theatre ever since I saw my first musical (Matilda in London, when I was 15 years old) – and I love reading about it, too. In Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, a British-Palestinian actor travels to the West Bank to see family and finds herself pulled into a local production of Hamlet. I was moved by the rehearsal scenes: arguments over translations, personal relationships, the question of whether a performance is even possible under Israeli occupation. To me, Hammad proved that theatre is capable of carrying weight that other art forms cannot hold.
David Miliband
CEO of the International Rescue Committee
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, a book about growing up in Albania, the last Stalinist country in Europe, doesn’t sound like a rollicking good read, but Lea Ypi’s book, published in 2021, is at once hilarious and serious, appalling in its description of the lies and tentacles of the regime of Enver Hoxha and touching in its humanity, particular in its focus and universal in its application. I often say about refugees and their contribution to adopted homelands that those who have known the price of oppression don’t need any lessons in the value of freedom. Ypi’s personal story, from “Young Pioneer” in the Albanian Communist party to student in Italy and professor in the UK, is warming but also full of warnings. She has turned her experience into fuel for her political philosophy, and this makes Free more than a work of memory or history. It is also an engagement with the challenges of the present.
Katherine Rundell
Author
I think we’re often rightly sceptical of reviews that say a book is “laugh-out-loud funny” because, when we read them, they’re often, at best, smile-out-loud or plausibly caustic or flippant or wry. But Luke Kennard’s Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. It’s brilliant, a triumph of a book: the story of a young out-of-work actor who takes on a job working for a professor of psychology, who employs him to dress in a black bag during his lectures in order to gauge his students’ changing attitude to strangeness. It’s based on a real-life experiment from 1967. I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time.
Jack Thorne
Screenwriter
I was quite a weird kid. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising found that weirdness and twisted it. It’s a book I’m holding off sharing with my 10-year-old just yet because I want him to read it at the perfect age and I think that’s 11. It is about the battle between the Dark and the Light, weaving myth and history into a glorious concoction that uses language as a weapon. Complicated and mythic and entirely dangerous, it frequently sits still when other fantasies sprint and it’s all the better for it.
Margaret Busby
Publisher and president of English PEN
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by CLR James is an uplifting example of how the personal and political connect. First published in 1938, it puts on record the individual and collective resistance that led to the only successful revolt of the enslaved in history, still relevant as a defiant call to resisting oppression. James was my father’s friend since their schooldays in Trinidad, so when I realised in the 1970s that this masterpiece of historical literature was out of print in the UK, it was a privilege to be able to reissue it at Allison & Busby.
Philippa Perry
Psychotherapist
In a letter to her niece Anna, Jane Austen wrote: “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” She said you don’t need sweeping plots, just close observation, small interactions, and the way people behave with one another day to day. And I think EF Benson may have taken this advice to heart when he wrote his Mapp and Lucia series. Read it and laugh about how absurd we all are. Nothing very much happens, which is the point (unless being washed out to sea on an upturned kitchen table is something happening). It’s all social manoeuvring, tiny slights, inflated egos and people taking themselves too seriously. Read it, and then decide which character most resembles you. I think there’s a bit of me in all of them.
Sajid Javid
Politician
I first read Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre when I was 14. It’s never left me. It tells the story of partition, a period that my father had already brought to life by recounting his own experience, and is written with the pace, colour and dramatic flair of a novel. I have gone back to it many times over the years, and always feel the emotional force that it brings to an important period of history. It’s one of those rare books that you keep an extra copy of to press into the hands of your children and friends.
Tony Robinson
Actor and author
I’m currently enthralled by a small but exquisite book called The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English. It’s written by Hana Videen and the Old English she refers to isn’t the language of Shakespeare, whose syntax may be unfamiliar but whose words we can understand. This is the tongue of our ninth-century CE ancestors for whom Alfred the Great, fearing the decline of learning following the Viking raids, translated the finest Latin works of his time into the common vernacular. The words on offer are a joy. Dream-craeft means music, heafod-swima is intoxication, a wil-cuma is someone whose arrival is a pleasure. Dipping into this wordhord makes me feel happy.
Sarah Moss
Author
I find that with passing years I become more insistent on spending time with books (and people) that are kind as well as clever. Shirley Jackson is best known for very dark fiction, but her two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, are wildly funny and sharp. It’s hard to write loving domestic comedy in the best of circumstances – sarcasm is so tempting – and Jackson’s circumstances were not the best: a novelist raising four children in 1950s America with a professorial husband who was insecure about her success and unprofessionally interested in the undergraduates at his women’s college. The memoirs manage to acknowledge and not minimise the unfairness and banality of her situation and at the same time insist on space for laughter and delight. I read them the first time on a train and giggled so much the people at my table wrote down the title.
Ocean Vuong
Poet and author
I was lucky enough to discover Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans back in community college, early in my life and long before I wrote anything worth reading. This book is, to this day, one of the most innovative, strange and nebulous hybrids of text and images I’ve ever encountered. Written during the Great Depression but published in obscurity during the second world war, it forges a new way to write about suffering, one where the writer is not only a subjective participant in its reality, but perhaps even culpable for the horrors it depicts. It collapses any easy, cathartic answers we might expect nonfiction to provide. But perhaps most vitally, it’s a book that gives unlimited permission to dare, venture and risk in one’s own work and thinking.
Elif Shafak
Author
“Nothing is harder to do than nothing.” This is the basic premise and the opening line of a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. It is a fascinating take on how and why we need to resist the relentless demands of our hyper-information society. It reminds us that our value as human beings is not dependent on our productivity levels or amount of consumption on any given day. It recognises that solitude, compassion, friendship, introspection, contemplation – all these universal and ancient qualities – are inalienable rights. Inviting readers to become better observers, better listeners, it encourages us to slow down. To pay more attention to the seemingly small, “insignificant things”, reconnect with each other, with nature and with ourselves. In a world where there is constant clamour, too much rigidity, polarisation and tribalism, this book shows us that you can be gentle, calm, nuanced and still be political, attending to the local, to the humble, and to what makes us human.
Susie Dent
Lexicographer
I read Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (The Lost Estate in English) when I was a teenager, and I’m not sure anything has quite matched it since. It is a tale of first love and a young man’s obsessive search for a lost estate and the elusive girl he once encountered there. All of it is caught in that fleeting, half-lit space between childhood and adolescence, when we’re still oblivious to what growing up will cost us. Perfect for a 17-year-old with a head full of daydreams, but even now I fall under its spell the moment I pick it up.
Ruth Ozeki
Zen Buddhist priest and author
A book I can get lost in, again and again, is Borges: Collected Fictions. It contains some of my favourite short stories – The Aleph, The Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths – as well as shorter works such as Borges and I, and the strange Afterword to the collection The Maker, which resist classification. Whenever I reread these pieces, I can see how deeply they’ve informed my work. I doubt Borges would recognise the influence he’s had on me. I am grateful to him, and I can only hope he would not be offended.
John Lanchester
Author
Ursula K Le Guin is an exemplary figure in demonstrating the potential of what is still too often and too easily dismissed as “genre” fiction. It’s a toss-up for me between the first Earthsea novel – the original and best book about a school for wizards – and The Left Hand of Darkness, but I’ll go with the latter because of its thematic richness. I love how Le Guin’s work functions on multiple levels: you can read the book purely as an entertainment, but it is also a serious novel about gender, sexuality and negotiating otherness. Hard to believe it came out in 1969; that’s how long it has taken us to catch up with Le Guin.
Karen Hao
Journalist
I was in a dark place after working on my book Empire of AI, and Rebecca Solnit’s short, beautiful volume Hope in the Dark gave me new life. It’s a powerful meditation on the history of resistance movements, and why it is never time to despair, no matter the obstacles that appear before us. It was the antidote I needed, and one I now carry with me wherever I go – a reminder that yesterday, today and tomorrow was, is and will be a good day to act.
Val McDermid
Author
I often recommend to people (aged from nine to 90) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s been adapted in so many formats, there’s always an entry level point to engage readers. I first encountered it when I was nine, in the form of a Classic Comic, what we’d now call a graphic novel. I was enthralled by so many elements – the adventure of the story, the settings (on the ship and on the island), the vivid characters (who doesn’t know Long John Silver and his parrot?). I soon discovered the book and was captivated. I reread it annually and the magic still works.
Simon Jenkins
Columnist and author
The American scholar Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers will always be my bible. It is subtitled A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself, but it is actually a lively history of geography. Ever since Ptolomy and the ancient Greeks, geography was the queen of the sciences. It suffered persecution by the medieval church as anti-biblical heresy, which led to its disregard by curriculum snobs ever since. The book sees geography as the key science for history, politics, economics and the environment. Boorstin demands that we use the evidence of the world around us rather than our prejudices and opinions as the fount of all reason.
Matt Haig
Author
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a slim, easy read, but deep. The premise is simple, if strange. Kublai Khan is given by Marco Polo descriptions of cities the younger explorer has visited. These cities are imaginary and fantastical. And all are revealed to be hallucinogenic versions of Venice. This book is basically a series of meditations. It is a calming book. The pleasure of it – and it really is my most pleasurable reading experience – is the pleasure of imagination. You can pick it up at any page and find a different city, a different imagined memory, a different impossible reality. It’s the joy of reading in its purest form and works for an ADHD mind like mine. No plot to worry about, no information to retain, no real before or after. Just the joy of travelling into a fantasy Venice. A holiday for the mind.
Sarah Hall
Author
When my dad was dying I read to him from In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs. The story is about a young man imprisoned for love, brutalised, set free and nursed back to health by strangers. It’s a short, luminous, extraordinary novel, infused by a genuine understanding of what it means to suffer; a knowledge that life is sometimes pared to the bone, but endurance and hope still carry us. Dad and I both had Covid; the hospital managed to grant me access to be with him, but we were isolated. To have this book in my hands was like having my friend with me during the most difficult heartbreak. Although he was fading, my dad loved the story, which is truly beautiful and full of positive mortality. It is, to this day, companionable to see the title on my bookshelf.
Marcus du Sautoy
Mathematician
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. I’m not usually a fan of short stories but I love the way Borges can so brilliantly conjure up a whole universe in just 10 pages. He was fascinated in the emerging ideas of infinity and multidimensional space but instead of formulas he uses narrative and storytelling to explore these ideas. The Library of Babel is my favourite, about a library that contains every book it’s possible to write. The librarian realises that the library contains nothing because no one has made any choices. The creativity of the writer comes down to choosing which stories to share with readers and, for me, Borges’s choices are ones I return to again and again.
Hay festival runs until 31 May. See hayfestival.com
