How We Live Now with Katherine May

Recently, Katherine interviewed Sarah Moss about her incredible new memoir, My Good Bright Wolf, an account of growing up as a difficult girl in a difficult family, and how this ultimately led to her…

What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?’

So writes Hilary Mantel in her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. First published in 2003, it offers a snapshot of the gr…

It was National Poetry Day in the UK earlier this month and Katherine talked to Kate Fox about her new book, On Sycamore Gap, in an extra Book Club event. Kate’s book is about a very special tree in …

September - when we’re almost as likely to be trying to reform ourselves as in January - is the perfect moment for Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals.

Katherine sat down to talk to O…

This month, Katherine spoke to Lucy Jones about Matrescence, her book about the profound changes wrought by pregnancy and birth. Combining the biological, the social and the political with exquisite …

Katherine was excited to speak to Daniel Tammet about his latest book, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum. Katherine has been reading Daniel’s writing for a long time - his first book, Born on a…

Join Katherine as she talks with Tom Newlands about his debut novel, Only Here, Only Now. Katherine talks with Tom about his female main protagonist, the unforgettable Cora, setting the book in 1990s…

Join me for a recent conversation with comedian, essayist, blogger, and television writer Samantha Irby. Recorded as part of my True Stories Book Club hosted on Substack, we talked about realising yo…

Join my conversation with Catherine Coldstream as we relax into a questing, rambling chat about the deep pull that many of us feel towards the quiet and gentle rhythms of the monastic life, and the r…

At a superficial level, Soil is a gardening memoir, full of gorgeous descriptions of plants and getting your hands in the soil. But the garden in question is a political gesture, an act of resistance…

In the past few years, resistance has been a live issue for many of us, whether we’re wondering for the first time how to bring about social change, or realising that we need to find new ways to be a…

The wolf carries an almost unbearable amount of symbolism in western culture, encapsulating the predatory, the carnal, the supernatural and the ravenous. But in her book Wolfish, Erica Berry suggests…

I stumbled across Dacher Keltner’s work when I was first researching Enchantment, and now - for the final episode in this season - I’m honoured to speak to him about Awe: The New Science of Everyday …

Marjolijn van Heemstra believes that we can change the world by gazing into the night sky. Her book, In Light Years There’s No Hurry, explores the ‘overview effect’, a personal transformation reporte…

How can we return to a richer, more complex understanding of national identity and personal ethics - one that can only come from folklore?

Amy Jeffs is the perfect person to ask. An art historian and …

In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, Katherine speaks to author and public intellectual Báyò Akómoláfé. We consider how we can step out of the belief that humanity is in control of a passive pl…

Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s writing rings with a sense of connection between this world and the otherworld, and nowhere is it expressed more clearly than in her latest book, Cacophony of Bone. Here are pa…

When I spoke to Morgan Harper Nichols, she was taking a break from assignment-writing for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts she’s studying. That’s a telling detail for this exuberant soul: she …

Pico Iyer’s latest book, The Half Known Life, looks at the ways in which we seek paradise on earth, sometimes in places that are fraught with risk. In this episode, he and Katherine talk about the si…

We're in between seasons of How We Live Now and Katherine is in the midst of talking about her new book Enchantment in radio and podcast interviews. We wanted to share one of these conversations with…