Eland Interviews Nicholas Shakespeare

Steph Allen June 23, 2026

First person that inspired you to become a story-teller? Be it teacher, grandmother, the radio.

The first story-teller I knew was my grandfather, the broadcaster and author SPB Mais, and he was the reason why I never wanted to become a writer myself. Quite famous in his day, now forgotten, he wrote upwards of 300 books (with titles like Some Books I Like, and its sequel More Books I Like). When he died, bankrupt and heartbroken after his wife of 60 years ran off with someone else, I thought, If that’s what it means to be a writer, count me out.

Thankfully, the second writer I met was Jorge Luis Borges. As a teenager in Buenos Aires, I’d climb to his apartment in Avenida Maipu and read Kipling and Hamlet to him (after first asking if Borges would contribute a poem to my school magazine). He was the reason why I wanted to become a writer. One of his beliefs was that every writer invents their own precursors.

Three Came Home: A mother's ordeal in a Japanese prison camp by Agnes Keith

Steph Allen November 28, 2025

Three Came Home, this searing chronicle of a family imprisoned on the island of Borneo in the Second World War, is the best-known of Agnes Newton Keith’s six published memoirs. It is as unlike its precursor, Land Below the Wind, as hell is unlike heaven. Entangled in hatred and cruelty, the captives’ despair was somewhat mitigated by their resourcefulness. The somewhat-mitigated despair of Three Came Home gave way in its successor, White Man Returns, to guarded hope for humankind. Keith’s three Borneo books can be viewed as chapters in the beloved American/Canadian writer’s life of travel, adventure and tribulation with her spouse. Agnes Keith’s writing is as much about Harry Keith as it is about Borneo. Harry is writ large because the writer was at ﬁrst just one-half of a colourful couple. The Keiths continued to be colourful for the thirty-six-year span of Agnes’s oeuvre. But they possessed a ‘terrible knowledge’ from their wartime experience — the phrase was from Bruce Hutchison, at the time, dean of Canadian journalists: ‘She has an intimate, not to say a terrible[,] knowledge of the Japanese mind’ — and the experience gave gravitas to her writing against war.

Clive Murphy, editor of A Funny Old Quist, introduced by The Gentle Author

Steph Allen June 20, 2025

Above a curry house in Brick Lane lived Clive Murphy like a wise owl snug in the nest he constructed of books, and lined with pictures, photographs, postcards and cuttings over the nearly fifty years that he occupied his tiny flat. Originally from Dublin, Clive had not a shred of an Irish accent. Instead he revelled in a well-educated vocabulary, a spectacular gift for rhetoric and a dry taste for savouring life’s ironies. He possessed a certain delicious arcane tone that you would recognise if you have heard his fellow-countryman Francis Bacon talking. In fact, Clive was a raconteur of the highest order and I was a willing audience, happy merely to sit at his feet and chuckle appreciatively at his colourful and sometimes raucous observations.

I was especially thrilled to meet Clive because he was a writer after my own heart who made it his business to seek out people and record their stories. At first in Pimlico and then here in Spitalfields through the sixties and seventies, Clive worked as ‘a modern Mayhew, publishing the lives of ordinary people who had lived through the extraordinary upheavals and social changes of the first three-quarters of the century before they left the stage.’ He led me to a bookshelf in his front room and showed me a line of nine books of oral history that he edited, entitled Ordinary Lives, as well as his three novels and six volumes of ribald verse. I was astonished to be confronted with the achievements of this self-effacing man living there in two rooms in such beautiful extravagant chaos.

Rose Brookfield on Mahi Binebine's Welcome to Paradise

Steph Allen May 2, 2025

Eland are proud to reissue this compassionate novel. First published in French in 1999, but as timely and relevant today, on a subject rarely out of the news. Binebine is one of Morocco’s leading literary voices and artists and we welcome him to the Eland list.

A writer, says Mahi Binebine, is ‘a sponge’ forever soaking up ‘rumours, passed-down tall tales and family lore.’ Like any good storyteller, Mahi Binebine is a magpie; constantly foraging the streets of Marrakech, newspapers, and what happens in his own life, for stories he might weave into his hypnotic tales. As a young boy he would cross the Djemaa el Fna on his way to school. It was then that Mahi first witnessed the lives of the artists making their living on the square: snake charmers, street performers, merchants, beggars, migrants, and the legendary Moroccan figure of the storyteller.

Letter from Jaipur

Steph Allen March 13, 2025

Jaipur is the best literary festival in the world, not because it is the biggest (it is not), nor because it is well-funded (it is not) but because it is free. Or almost free. You have to register in advance, but the five-day student pass will set back a young scholar 100 rupees, which is under £1.

This creates an audience unlike anything else I have encountered. A Jaipur audience is younger, smarter, more alert and attentive. It is opinionated, bright-eyed and stylish. Since no one buys seat tickets, if the audience feels that the speaker (be they ever-so-famous on the little screen) is underperforming, they simply rise up and go listen to someone more articulate and honest, often achieving this exit with some style, as sarees and scarves, or school blazers, are adjusted with a determined flourish. At any hour of the day there are seven simultaneous talks being held, most of them in open-sided tents within the Jaipur Festival compound, so there is plenty of choice, and plenty of freedom to move. My travelling companion and I agreed not to attend the same talks so we could double up on the already dazzling range of options. On each of the five days (Thursday through to Monday) the three biggest tents (Front Lawn, Charbagh and Surya Mahal) will host nine separate sessions, including a start-up session of a Morning Raga – classical Indian music. In the early evening there is always a raucous, high-volume and boldly-lit rock concert performed by bands flown in from Delhi or Bombay for which tickets are keenly purchased by Jaipur’s youth. For the rest, no individual, neatly numbered seat tickets are sold for any of the acts, nor are seats reserved for speakers or sponsors. So unlike our dear old, stuffy little Britain there are no veiled class distinctions in the seating, or entrance queues waiting for ticket checking, just a determined free flow of individuals. For the more popular sessions, a crust ten individuals thick can surround the packed rows of seats within the tents, all craning to get some sort of view. In the indoor halls, if there are no free chairs, the overflow audience neatly folds their legs to sit in the aisles or cluster around the stage.

Eland Christmas Quiz and ideas for all Readers

Steph Allen December 1, 2024

Our December newsletter is out featuring the Eland Christmas Quiz 2024 and ideas for every Christmas stocking, including our new tote bags!

Lesley Chan Downer on Japan

Steph Allen October 11, 2024

After eight years working in Japan, immersing herself in its language and literature, Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan’s most cherished poet, to explore the country’s remote northern provinces. Basho’s pilgrimage to find the landscapes that had inspired the great medieval poets gave birth to Japan’s most famous travel book, rich in strange imagery and sometimes comic encounters along the road.

Ian Skeet on Muscat & Oman: The End of an Era

Steph Allen June 26, 2024

Muscat exhales history. You can sense it in the heavy hot air of summer and the light bright winter mornings, in the dusty alleys and the large crumbling square houses and it’s stored up, it must be, in some concentrated distillation in the forts of Merani and Jalali. A whiff is mixed with the breeze daily, but, like the widow’s cruse, it will not run out, not at least until the forts, and the houses, and the walls and the towers are torn down to make way for blocks of flats and offices and off-street parking.

The forts are most people’s first, and usually most lasting, image of Muscat, an image that is almost tactile, so solid are they. Coming by road up and over the last pass from Muttrah they are angled and merged almost into one, heavy and grey over the faded blue and dirty white wash of the huddled houses. From the sea they stand square in front of you, like two enormous bastions built for a suspension bridge across the harbour; but in place of the bridge there is the front line of the town, dominated by the Sultan’s palace and the British Consulate General, both gazing straight out to sea. Very proper too, for much of the history stored up in those forts and pervading the town came in ships from that same postcard blue sea, glittering peacefully in the sunshine of 1967.

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