The youngest winner of the Booker Prize fell silent for nearly 20 years. Now she's back with a new novel.

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With only her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize, the leading literary prize in the global Anglosphere, becoming - at the time - the youngest person ever to do so. She was thirty-five. Then: silence. 19 years of it, before another novel emerged - this year. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Desai joins Tanjil Rashid on The New Society to discuss her latest novel, and why it was 19 years in the making.

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The experimental novelist on finding God, being "a misfit" and her return to writing.

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Nicola Barker is "has broken the mould so many times it's almost beyond repair".

She's a post-punk literary anarchist who writes from the peripheries of the UK.

Her experiments with narrative form have won her many plaudits, including the Goldsmith's Prize for literary fiction, which the New Statesman partners with.

Barker joins Tanjil Rashid on the New Statesman culture podcast to discuss her latest novel, Tony Interrupter: a comedy about art, virality, chaos, and the surprising impact of freak events in Kent.

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Cinephiles are revisiting Whit Stillman's 90's movies. Tanjil Rashid meets Stillman to find out why.

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Whit Stillman is something of a cult film director. He rose to prominence in 1990 with his debut film Metropolitan, which became the first in the so-called “Doomed. Bourgeois. In love” trilogy: Barcelona came out in 1994 and The Last Days of Disco in 1998. Set among America’s so-called “Preppy” class, the films are comedies of manners in the tradition of Jane Austen, exploring the transitional phase of youth and a certain American identity.

The films are now having something of a revival. Stillman joins the New Statesman's culture editor Tanjil Rashid.

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