The rumours are that white male writers are becoming extinct, but the reality is that rumours of their extinction have been greatly exaggerated. Take David Szalay. White and male and privately educated and Oxbridge and, phew, a Booker Prize winner! The fu…

Mary Astell has been billed as Newcastle’s first feminist, but what happens when she meets Virginia Woolf in the afterlife? The Live Theatre has answers. Shelagh Stephenson has penned some of the most lauded plays of the last thirty years or so (includ…

A young woman exhumes her uncomfortable family history in Spanish writer-director Carla Simon’s engaging semi-autobiographical drama. The year is 2004 and eighteen-year-old Marina Piñeiro (Garcia) travels from Barcelona to Vigo, a city on the Spanish coas…