I am a writer and editor based in London. My work has appeared in the FT, Guardian, Prospect Magazine, New Statesman, TLS, Spectator, TANK and others. I write predominantly about literature and culture with a focus on the Caucasus and its surrounding regions.

Criticism

  • The Lack of Light — an epic, edge-of-the-seat tale of friendship and political chaos

    Financial Times

  • Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart — childlike bemusement

    Financial Times

  • Modern masculinity and the curious paradox at the core of fatherhood

    Financial Times

  • The Sound of Utopia — how Stalin waged war on musicians

    Financial Times

  • My Streaming Gem: My Happy Family by Nana Ekvtimishvili

    The Guardian

  • The Empusium – Olga Tokarczuk’s carnivalesque homage to Thomas Mann

    Financial Times

  • The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler — a fable-like story of an ordinary man

    Financial Times

  • Georgi Gospodinov review — an anatomy of melancholy

    Financial Times

  • The Variations by Patrick Langley review – hearing the voices of the dead

    the Guardian

  • Summer in Baden-Baden — a pilgrim in search of Dostoyevsky’s soul

    Financial Times

  • Jon Fosse’s A Shining — light in the darkness

    Jon Fosse’s A Shining — light in the darkness

    Financial Times

  • Bolla by Pajtim Statovci review – illicit love in the shadow of war

    the Guardian

  • Rombo by Esther Kinsky — oral histories of an Italian earthquake

    Financial Times

  • Where You Come From by Sasa Stanisic – fragmented lives

    Financial Times

  • The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca – an intimate exposé of totalitarian Romania

    Financial Times

  • Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: a vivid blend of travelogue, history and memoir

    New Statesman

  • The Suitcase by Frances Stonor Saunders — baggage reclaim

    Financial Times

  • Scattered All Over the Earth – what it means to belong

    Financial Times

  • ‘I was frightened every single day’: the perils of guarding Stalin

    The Spectator

  • Manaschi by Hamid Ismailov – Better a hell you can agree with

    TLS

  • In Maria Reva’s Kafkaesque satire, puzzled occupants discover their Soviet tower block doesn’t exist

    The Calvert Journal

  • ‘No-Signal Area’: a piercing novel on the villains and victims of capitalism

    The Calvert Journal

  • The Possessed — Witold Gombrowicz’s seriously good comic novel

    Financial Times

  • OPIA: A night of performances curated by Ólafur Arnalds

    TANK Magazine

  • The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati — that unnameable feeling of being alive

    Financial Times

  • C.D. Rose’s ‘Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else’

    The White Review

  • Poppyland — DJ Taylor’s wistful short stories of lives lived in the margins

    Financial Times

  • Endling — the outbreak of war, a shattered Ukrainian reality . . . and snails

    Financial Times

  • We Computers — a genre-blending, time-bending, poetic novel

    Financial Times

Essays

Interviews

  • Nino Haratischvili: 'I never understood how Georgians could be proud of Stalin'

    the Guardian

  • BEN OKRI: “The thing that we're most in danger of losing is the thing we sometimes seem to abound in”

    TANK Magazine

  • In conversation with Geoff Dyer

    TANK Magazine

  • 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer

    the Guardian

  • JON FOSSE: “Writing is creating a form that is its own universe, rules by its own laws”

    TANK Magazine

  • ‘I wanted this book to be a reconciliation’: Lea Ypi on growing up in communist Albania

    The Calvert Journal

  • VALZHYNA MORT: “A singing voice – and a screaming voice – is the furthest we can stand outside of our bodies”

    TANK Magazine

  • GEORGE SAUNDERS: “The story is anything that keeps you reading”

    TANK Magazine