From Our Authors

I suppose the first gentle push towards The Friendly Ones happened in the very early 1970s. My family was living in South London. My mother worked for the fire brigade, and had a friend in the office who lived very near by. The friend asked us round; there was some family event. She was Indian, and her house was not quite like ours. It was a house of gorgeous colours, an unusual perfume in the air, and a grandmother wearing something beyond my powers of description in both colour and construction – I think it must have been a brilliant pink sari. The manners of the family were unfamiliar – the four of us were divided into separate rooms to be entertained.. Afterwards the fact was clear: not everybody is like you. Read More

What does “feminism” mean today? In We Should All Be Feminists, this personal, eloquently argued essay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now – an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists. Enjoy this empowering extract today. Read More

As part of our month-wide celebration of women’s writing, 4th Estate will be bringing you exclusive written pieces from our fantastic authors. We presented them with a selection of questions to choose from, and the responses we’ve had have been hugely inspiring. We can’t wait to share them all with you. Read More

What does it mean to be a woman in 2018? What do you hope is different for the women in your family in 50 years' time? If you could change one thing about how society views the feminist movement, what would it be? Read More

How do you raise a child to be a feminist? Dear Ijeawele by Chimamanda Ngzoi Adichie offers fifteen compelling, direct and perceptive suggestions to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. Together they start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today. Read More

Words by Gregory Norminton For years, I have wanted to write a book about ‘deep England’ in the manner of Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton: a narrative that charts the many places that one place becomes over generations. It was only by living far away – in Edinburgh, and later Manchester and Sheffield – that I realised where my subject awaited me: in the unsung landscape of my Surrey childhood. Read More

We are living in J.G. Ballard's world, that much is clear. So precise were Ballard's not-so-future predictions that it is beyond cliché to link our current political, technological, architectural and even social states to the man's writing. But, outside of his great 1970s social-dystopias and his morbid retail-park nightmares of the millennial period, Ballard's shorter writing has just as much to say about our time as his more famous novels. This may be because we have moved on so very little from the period of Ballard's most popular writing but it fails to lessen the effect of reading his work; forever inducing a look up from the page just to check that he's not still about, somehow taking notes as the world beyond merges with his words. This feeling occurred for me most powerfully a few years back, not in front of a London high-rise or in the cavern underneath a motorway as is to be expected, but whilst visiting the ex-weapons testing facility of Orford Ness in Suffolk. Equally, it was not a novel of Ballard's that had given rise to this feeling but a short story of his written in 1964; the strangely melancholic The Terminal Beach. Read More

In college, a professor introduced me to a long eighteenth-century poem by James Thomson called The Seasons. Tremendously influential in its time, it is a lyrical and expansive description of the countryside. There is an entire language here that attends to and celebrates the natural world, and reading it, the salient feature is how rare that is. This is a loss, because it’s probably good for a person, to feel for wild places and to see them clearly. We treat this appreciation as something that comes naturally, but like anything else, you’ve got to learn it. Read More

For much of the time I was writing My Absolute Darling, I lived on the fourth floor of a falling-down apartment building in downtown Salt Lake City. In the summer, with the heat rising from the apartments below us, it could get to be 106 degrees. We had no air-conditioning, and I’d work hunched on the floor, dripping sweat, slamming redbull, and loving the work. In the winter, if I left a glass on the windowsill, it would ice over. The radiators hissed and steamed and sometimes fountained water like you were in a submarine that had just been hit. I wrote whenever I could. I had no regular hours, no desk, no place save the living room floor, no meditative rituals, no artist’s lifestyle, no coffeehouses I frequented, nothing except the work itself. I wrote whenever I wasn’t in the backcountry and wasn’t at the restaurant. I tried to keep my hours at the restaurant down to thirty a week, and I tried to write for thirty or forty more, which meant getting up and getting straight to the keyboard and working hard throughout the day if I was to have any chance of getting out climbing that night. Read More

The 4thcoming series is all about introducing you to our authors.  If you’ve ever wondered what your favourite 4th Estate author is currently reading, listening to or what their writing ritual is, then we’ve got all those answers for you. Name: Gabriel Tallent Read More

The 4thcoming series is all about introducing you to our authors.  If you’ve ever wondered what your favourite 4th Estate author is currently reading, listening to or what their writing ritual is, then we’ve got all those answers for you. Name: Craig Brown What's it about?  A biography of Princess Margaret, the royal who made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up; who cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor. Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, diaries and essays, Ma'am, Darling is a breezy meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society. Read More

The 4thcoming series is all about introducing you to our authors.  If you’ve ever wondered what your favourite 4th Estate author is currently reading, listening to or what their writing ritual is, then we’ve got all those answers for you. Name: Zinzi Clemmons Read More