London Review Bookshop Podcast · Episode

July 14, 2026 – “My notes began to look like a glossary for some absent text.”

Cadno, she called the foxes, the southern word, warmer in the mouth than its northern cousin.

In a compelling fusion of psychological crime thriller and contemporary dance, Scorched Earth at Brisbane Powerhouse lays bare the tangled wounds of colonization, capital, and loss. Reviewed by Leila ...

I wrote my memoir, Huna, in English, which is to say I wrote it inside a contradiction. Huna is a memoir of the Egyptian revolution, six years of political imprisonment in Egypt, and my US exile. I…

A psychoanalytic history of the sea.

At a rooftop party, you dance near every edge.

I could see the branches, how they swept back and back. The sky a narrow scrap of color breaching gray cloudfront. In the human landscape, dandelions and debris, overgrown blades of sward. I felt a…

September 4, 2026 – “The terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have the same dominant energy as ‘God’ or ‘the Devil’ in a poem.”

As migrants and refugees in diaspora and in exile from Iran, who have our loved ones suffering in the Iranian state’s prisons and facing its gallows, we salute the signatories of the open letter To Ir...

Female Kurdish fighters who became global symbols of the fight against Islamic State are negotiating with Syria's new authorities to retain ​a combat role after a government overhaul left their future uncertain.

Coercive control is a daily reality for thousands of women across the country. It’s time to stand up and speak out for their safety

People with persistent predatory personalities cause an inordinate amount of pain. Recently, our shared understanding of them has grown – and it could help protect us

She second-guessed herself and was eager to please. She ‘felt frozen’ when she believed she displeased someone

I think Cliff Swallow sounds like the name / of a beige-clad mortgage broker who hangs

Did Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas contradict his feminist ideals? A recent controversy reveals deep divides over patriarchy and social change in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Steven McRae and Vasko Vassilev on obsession, collaboration, and making Paganini "look cool" at the Linbury

Read about Joann Kealiinohomoku’s groundbreaking 1970 essay, An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance, which looks at ballet as a culturally specific art form, challenging its perce...

What do we take from this life, this land, this community, and what do we leave behind? Leila Lois talks to Ebony Bott and the artists shaping her first Brisbane Festival programme (4–26 September, 20...

My pick of the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Winter Season 2026

The following first appeared via Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency. Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the Br…

The Kurdish and Palestinian movements were forged in a common anti-colonial tradition. Their different political trajectories now reveal two competing models of liberation in the 21st century.

July 21, 2026 – “I loved that Odysseus could transition so easily from being somebody to being nobody, and back again."

Leila Lois spends an afternoon in Newport to witness how a fiercely local, radically inclusive company is redefining classical ballet through the lens of Welsh heritage and contemporary bodies.

Through pomegranates, card games, motherhood, and community, a Kurdish American writer reflects on the rituals that sustain belonging.

In Iceland, people commemorated its first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. Western culture needs more of these rituals

New Book Offers Fresh Interpretation of Kurdish Classic Mem û Zîn

Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge raised the Shengal genocide in the federal parliament.Senator Shoebridge said: ‘‘On 3 August, the world will commemorate Roja Reş (The Black Day), when ...

Australian poems by Australian poets are at the heart of Red Room Poetry, an organisation devoted to creating, publishing and promoting the reading and writing of great new work.

Selling the Iranian feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad.

The Persepolis author understood us and translated us for the world. We have lost our most eloquent spokesperson

London Review Bookshop Podcast · Episode

What we do when we are done

Leila Lois speaks to the artists of Melbourne's RISING Dance Biennale and reveals a programme that feels urgent, uncomfortably alive, and may have saved Australian contemporary dance.

John Neumeier’s ballet The Lady of the Camellias (1978) has been a firm favourite at the Paris Opéra Ballet, performed roughly every three to four years