This month’s best paperbacks: Salman Rushdie, Margo Jefferson and more
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some excellent new paperbacks, from an astonishing study of premonitions to a Booker prize-winning novel
March 2023
Margo Jefferson wins 2023 Rathbones Folio prize
The writer and critic’s memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, was described as ‘astounding and rhapsodic’ by judges
January 2023
NoViolet Bulawayo and Margo Jefferson join ‘exciting’ Rathbones Folio prize shortlist
The newly formatted prize will, for the first time, name winners in fiction, nonfiction and poetry and the shortlist includes writers from across the world
August 2022
Gordon Burn prize shortlist announced: jazz icons, true crime and a rogue psychotherapist
Preti Taneja, David Whitehouse, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Margo Jefferson and Lea Ypi are shortlisted for the prize rewarding ‘bold and innovative’ books
May 2022
Constructing a Nervous System review – a deeply personal account of black female identity
Margo Jefferson’s follow-up to her acclaimed Negroland is another intimate and intelligent memoir that asks searching questions about her heritage and a privileged US society
March 2022
Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga among this year’s Windham-Campbell prize winners
Dangarembga, American writer Margo Jefferson and British playwright Winsome Pinnock are among eight recipients of the $165,000 grants, as the award marks its 10th anniversary
May 2018
Books interview
Margo Jefferson: ‘I have always loved Michael Jackson’
The US author talks about her book on the troubled star who distilled so many of our cultural obsessions
July 2017
Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers – part one
A plagiarist in a kitchen and a horse walking into a bar; Dublin crimes and Washington misdemeanours; relationships, revolutions and relaxations ... leading writers reveal their summer recommendations
January 2017
Best new paperbacks of the month
Best new paperbacks: Margo Jefferson, Julian Barnes, Decca Aitkenhead
Negroland by Margo Jefferson review – a brilliant memoir about race in America
July 2016
The Guardian Books podcast
Lives shaped by history with Hisham Matar and Margo Jefferson – books podcast
We examine how the most personal writing can illuminate a wider world as Hisham Matar and Margo Jefferson turn to memoir
June 2016
Book of the day
Negroland by Margo Jefferson review – life in the black upper class
A captivating memoir on the distinction between white and black privilege and how the black power movement brought on a crisis for the author
May 2016
‘In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race’
Margo Jefferson: ‘I was anxious about using the word Negro in a book title’
March 2016
Margo Jefferson and Maggie Nelson win National Book Critics Circle Awards
An author’s relationship with a transgender artist and a memoir of growing up in an African-American community in Chicago among subjects of books honoured
November 2015
Margo Jefferson: 'It’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race'
The Pulitzer-winning cultural critic talks about her new memoir Negroland and explains why Black Lives Matter is right to take ‘respectability politics’ to task
