Joanna Biggs

Time​ is fake, and it is the realest thing there is. You can’t avoid the evidence, even if you aren’t looking: only four days in a year are 24 hours long; before the industrial revolution the weekend lasted until Tuesday; the day your mother dies is not the same length as the day you do your taxes. We have created seasons and years, adolescence and senescence, stories that take...

Awriter​ ‘with whom I feel no affinity’: that’s how Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, described Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. When the 77-year-old Yourcenar entered the Académie on 22 January 1981, wearing a black velvet double-layer cape designed by Yves Saint...

‘Love,’ Alain Badiou wrote, ‘is the minimal form of communism.’ In communism for two or for two billion, the way the gulf between people narrows is of great interest: both scenarios seem to involve mysterious and transformative forces. I remembered Badiou’s formulation when I heard Sally Rooney describe the genesis of her books. Her characters don’t arrive...

In the summer of​ 1975, the Nigerian-born British novelist Buchi Emecheta went missing for a day. She tucked £10 into her purse and went to Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard, then went to look at the glossy black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time. For lunch, she ate what she fancied – salad, cheesecake and not one, not two, but three glasses of bitter...

The​ problem with biography is that it’s impossible. Have you ever tried to write down the thoughts, the emotions, the memories that bubble up in a person over sixty seconds; where she is; what she’s wearing; what she can smell, taste and hear; who she’s with; what she’s saying; not to mention what contribution this 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of...