# The Quantum of Light

> Stories behind the authors

The Quantum of Light, the stories behind the authors and the worlds they build: interviews, debut voices, writing craft and poetry.

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## Sections
- [Interviews](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/interviews): Conversations with the authors behind the books
- [Debut Authors](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/debut-authors): First-time voices and the books that launched them
- [Writing Craft](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/writing-craft): On process, discipline, and the work of writing
- [Author Journeys](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/author-journeys): The lives and paths that led to the page
- [Poets & Poetry](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/poets-poetry): The poets and the verse worth slowing down for

## Latest articles
- [Bob Dylan Skipped His Own Nobel Ceremony Ten Years Ago, and No Songwriter Has Won the Prize Since](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-ten-years-on): The Swedish Academy's 2016 choice of a songwriter drew praise from Salman Rushdie and scorn from Irvine Welsh. A decade on, with the poet Anne Carson about to collect the prize, Dylan's win looks like a one-off.
- [Michael Palin, 83, Is Unsure He Will Travel Abroad Again After 37 Years Exploring the World](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/michael-palin-travel-abroad-again): Weeks after a fall at home, the travel writer has said his Philippines journey could be his last overseas. Here is what his journeys show you about travelling well at any age.
- [Tagore Won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Poems He Had Translated Into English Himself](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/rabindranath-tagore-nobel-prize-gitanjali): The first non-European laureate was chosen for his own English versions of Gitanjali, and the story of how those poems reached Stockholm explains both his fame in the West and how fast it faded.
- [Klara and the Sun Is the Latest Ishiguro Film to Fail Where The Remains of the Day Succeeded](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/kazuo-ishiguro-films-klara-and-the-sun): As Kazuo Ishiguro turns 72, Taika Waititi's panned Klara and the Sun joins a forty-year record of films made from his work, and his own rule for adaptation explains the hits and the misses.
- [Me vs AI: The Seven-Year-Old, Arrow Travnick Singing About AI](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/arrow-travnick-gen-alpha-me-vs-ai): The Sydney singer recorded Gen Alpha (Me vs AI) in Bali at six, through a night of nerves and a power cut. Her message to children and adults alike is that AI can be clever, but people still have to think for themselves.
- [Yannick Haenel Wins the Prix Femina 2026 a Day After Losing the Goncourt](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/prix-femina-2026-yannick-haenel): The former schoolteacher took the prize for La solitude des professeurs est infinie, his novel of a young teacher's first year in a Paris suburb, while Laura Kasischke won the foreign novel prize and Jennifer Tamas the essay prize.
- [The Best Books on Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the Three Masters of the High Renaissance](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/best-books-leonardo-michelangelo-raphael): Eleven books, from Vasari's eyewitness lives to a novel written by a man who apprenticed himself to a marble sculptor, that let you meet the three rivals who shared Florence in 1504.
- [Every Living Thing Won the 2025 Pulitzer for Biography With Two Rivals Who Tried to Name All Life on Earth](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/every-living-thing-pulitzer-2025): Jason Roberts follows Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, two men racing to describe every living thing, and shows how the wrong one won.
- [Italy Moves to Create a Restitution Panel That Could Return Nazi-Looted Art From Its Own Museums](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/italy-nazi-looted-art-restitution-panel): A bill before the Chamber of Deputies would give a five-member committee 180 days to rule on each claim and lift the rules that keep public artworks in Italy, more than 25 years after France and Britain set up their own panels.
- [François-Henri Désérable Wins the 100th Prix Renaudot for Le Palais, a Wine Novel Inspired by a Real Forger](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/prix-renaudot-2026-francois-henri-deserable): The 39-year-old former ice hockey player took six of the ten jury votes at Drouant for a novel about an orphan from Delhi with a perfect palate, partly modelled on the wine forger Rudy Kurniawan.
- [Philippe Jaenada Wins the Prix Goncourt 2026 for Reopening a 1949 Murder on the Banks of the Seine](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/prix-goncourt-2026-philippe-jaenada): The Académie Goncourt chose L'inconnue du quai de Javel by six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme, in a year when it struck a novel from its list over the use of artificial intelligence.
- [Philippe Vasset Wins the Prix Médicis 2026 for Two Years on Foot Beneath France's High-Voltage Lines](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/philippe-vasset-prix-medicis-2026): The journalist and novelist took the prize by five votes to four with Dans les grandes lignes, a walk across France from pylon to pylon that his own publisher doubted.
- [Native Nations Won the 2025 Pulitzer for History by Starting North America's Story a Thousand Years Ago](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/native-nations-pulitzer-2025): Kathleen DuVal begins with cities that rivalled any in the world and shows Native nations holding power long after Europeans arrived.
- [Ian Gillan's Medical Emergency Halts Deep Purple's UK Tour, Three Months After Ritchie Blackmore Rejoined Him on Stage](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/ian-gillan-deep-purple-uk-tour-postponed): Deep Purple have postponed the rest of their European and UK dates after their 81-year-old singer needed urgent hospital care in Leipzig, in a year that brought a new album and a reunion few fans expected.
- [35 Rembrandt Etchings Bought for a Few Guilders Kept in an Old Drawer](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/rembrandt-etchings-old-drawer-zutphen): Charlotte Meyer thought her grandfather had left her a folder of pretty pictures. Specialists from Amsterdam's Rembrandt House Museum told her otherwise.
- [Combee Won the 2025 Pulitzer for History by Telling Harriet Tubman's Civil War Raid Through the People She Freed](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/combee-pulitzer-2025): Edda L. Fields-Black traced her own ancestor into the Combahee River Raid, the day Harriet Tubman helped free 756 enslaved people.
- [James Won the 2025 Pulitzer for Fiction by Handing Huckleberry Finn's Story to Jim](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/james-pulitzer-2025): Percival Everett spent decades as a writer other writers revered, then gave Mark Twain's runaway his own voice and won the biggest prize in American fiction.
- [Howl and Other Poems Turns 70: The 75-Cent Pocket Book That Survived a Customs Seizure and an Obscenity Trial and Never Went Out of Print](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/howl-allen-ginsberg-70-years): City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's first collection on 1st November 1956. Seventy years on, the same small black-and-white edition has passed a million copies.
- [M. John Harrison, 81, Could Become the Oldest Booker Winner Ever](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/m-john-harrison-oldest-booker-contender): The writer who started out on the science fiction magazine New Worlds is shortlisted for The End of Everything, and a win would beat the record Margaret Atwood set at 79.
- [John Berger at 100: How He Used His 1972 Booker Prize Speech to Name the Caribbean Sugar Fortune Behind the Money and Gave Half of It to the Black Panthers](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/john-berger-at-100-booker-prize-speech): Born 100 years ago this week, John Berger stood up at the Café Royal in 1972, told the Booker dinner where the prize money came from and handed half of it to the British Black Panthers.
- [To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause Won the 2025 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction With the Soviet Dissidents Who Turned the Law Against the State](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/to-the-success-of-our-hopeless-cause-pulitzer-2025): Benjamin Nathans tells how a small band of Soviet citizens demanded that the Kremlin obey its own laws, and helped bring the system down.
- [Twenty Five, a Lycan Found-Family Fantasy for Mature Teens and Adults Drawn from Author Moshea's Years in Group Homes](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/best-werewolf-books-for-adults): Ten-year-old Jean-Eza's arrival at a group home changes the lives of 24 other boys, who discover their hidden Lycan nature and form a pack. Its author has spent decades studying child psychology, fostering, coaching and tutoring young people.
- [Ana Braunstein Turns Her Award-Winning Short Film This Case and My Life Into a Four-Book Series](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/this-case-and-my-life-book): The screenwriter and actress first told the story of attorney Chris Roberts on screen. The four novels follow him from a Manhattan law firm into marriage, fatherhood and a family home in Connecticut.
- [Anthony Eddolls on His FBI Thriller Series and Where Agent David Stilley Goes Next](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/anthony-eddolls-fbi-thriller-series-interview): The Maui-based crime novelist, who publishes through his own company, Robert Anthony Books, also talks about finding readers as an independent author and the scams aimed at new writers.
- [The Original 1768 Mason-Dixon Line Map, Once Owned by Malcolm Forbes, Is Up for Auction Again](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/mason-dixon-map-auction-brunk-forbes): Drawn and signed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the western section of their survey carries an $800,000 to $1.2 million estimate at Brunk Auctions in Asheville on October 29, the same range Christie's set when it last sold in 2002.
- [True Crime Author Maureen Hughes on Spotting a Rehearsed Answer and Staying Safe While Investigating the Mob](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/true-crime-author-maureen-hughes): The former police officer and bodyguard has written about organized crime for 26 years, from a newspaper heiress's ties to Johnny Roselli to a 1956 Cairo case ruled a suicide.
- [Tom LeNoble, Who Joined Facebook at 50, on How to Reinvent Yourself](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/how-to-reinvent-yourself): The former head of customer service at MCI, Walmart.com and Palm now advises founders and executives on changes of direction, and his memoir has won seven book awards, including a 2026 NYC Big Book Award.
- [Anne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature : Always Trying To Do Something Else ](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/anne-carson-nobel-prize-literature-2026): The Canadian poet and classicist took the call over tea in her Reykjavík kitchen, calls her own career "inadvertent" and is already working out how to give the prize money away.
- [Gender Queer Tops the American Library Association's Ranking of the Most Challenged Books Since 1990](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/ala-most-challenged-books-1990-2025-gender-queer): Ellen Hopkins has 14 of the 153 titles, more than any other author, while To Kill a Mockingbird ranks No. 65.
- [Rick Tabor's Sci-Fi Political Thriller The Blink of Humanity Explores the Dire Cost of Political Corruption](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/rick-tabor-the-blink-of-humanity): The Blink of Humanity follows a bioengineer with epilepsy and her robot companion as they set out to bring a corrupt US president to justice after a nuclear attack on Chicago.
- [Hanns Scharff's Son Chris Scharff Traces His Family's Path From Wartime Germany to Africa and America in WWII Memoir](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/hanns-scharff-son-chris-scharff-memoir): Born in Greiz in 1936, the Carlsbad author spent 20 years in South Africa and Rhodesia before joining his father in Los Angeles, and in retirement met one of the American pilots his father had interrogated.
- [Physician Associate and Spiritual Coach Elizabeth M. Lykins Says Lasting Change Begins in Stillness](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/elizabeth-m-lykins-reflections-on-transcendence): An urgent care provider since 1996, Elizabeth wrote Reflections on Transcendence, which features 59 paintings by her lifelong friend, the late expressionist Steven D. Lyons, who selected each painting to match the text.
- [Beautifully Unbroken Review: The Shower Shirt Inventor's Breast Cancer Memoir Begins with the Loss of Her Mother](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/beautifully-unbroken-review): The medical journalist who patented The Shower Shirt after her own mastectomy tells the story behind it, and the story of the mother she lost two weeks after her wedding, in a memoir that will be of most use to a woman with surgery ahead of her.
- [George Clooney at Venice Film Festival 2026 warning on authoritarians who silence journalists and storytellers first](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/george-clooney-at-venice-2026-warning-on-authoritarians-who-silence-journalists-and-artists-first): Collecting the festival's top career honour at 65, Clooney told reporters that deepfakes let people dismiss real evidence as fake, then used his acceptance speech to say authoritarians silence journalists and artists first.
- [Call Out The Dogs Review: Anthony Eddolls Takes Agent Stilley From a Rome Murder to the Doors of the White House](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/call-out-the-dogs-review): The third Special Agent David Stilley adventure opens as a two-city murder case and finishes as a political thriller, written by an author who spent four decades in finance before turning to crime fiction from his home in Upcountry Maui.
- [Shakespeare's First Folio Found in Saint-Omer](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/shakespeare-s-first-folio-found-in-saint-omer): The story of the Saint-Omer copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, catalogued for two centuries as a worthless eighteenth-century reprint before a librarian looked twice.
- [ Books Preserve a Civilization's Literary and Artistic Heritage](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/books-preserve-a-civilization-s-literary-and-artistic-heritage): We reflect on how books preserve literary and artistic heritage. The identity a civilisation carries forward each time it keeps a book alive from one generation to the next.
- [The Book Lady: How Dolly Parton's Imagination Library Gifted 332 Million Books](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/the-book-lady-how-dolly-parton-s-imagination-library-gifted-332-million-books): Celebrating Dolly Parton's literacy legacy, the Imagination Library she built for her father, who never learned to read.
- [Great and Unfortunate Things: The Memoir Jason Arday Leaves Behind](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/great-and-unfortunate-things-the-memoir-jason-arday-leaves-behind): What Jason Arday's memoir Great and Unfortunate Things tells, and how critics have received it, following his death days after its US publication.
- [Jason Arday, Cambridge's Youngest Black Professor, Dies Days at 41 After His Memoir is Published](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/jason-arday-cambridge-s-youngest-black-professor-dies-days-at-41-after-his-memoir-is-published): Jason Arday resigned from Cambridge on 5 August amid allegations of academic misconduct he denied. His memoir was published three days before he was found dead at his London home, prompting tribute from colleagues and renewed debate over how certain media reporting against him, not about him, were conducting toxic journalism.

## Reference
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