Boyd Tonkin

United Kingdom

Writer, Journalist and Literary Critic at Freelance

Chair @TheOrwellPrize fiction 2023; Benson Medallist @RSLiterature; words @FTLifeArts @TheEconomist @WSJ @TheTLS; '100 Best Novels in Translation' @Galileobooks

Articles

The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park review - into the storm of dreams

1 week ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden productions that banishes all sight of the sea. Because last night the ocean – or rather its typical weather – came to us. A stiff south-westerly punched for hours across the awnings of the semi-open theatre’s canopy.
The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park review - into the storm of dreams

1 week ago | theartsdesk.com | Boyd Tonkin

Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden productions that banishes all sight of the sea. Because last night the ocean – or rather its typical weather – came to us. A stiff south-westerly punched for hours across the awnings of the semi-open theatre’s canopy.
Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern

1 week ago | the-tls.co.uk | Judith Flanders |Boyd Tonkin |Gabriel Josipovici

Do Ho Suh’s childhood home was a reproduction hanok, a traditional-style Korean residence commissioned by his father, Suh Se-ok, himself a noted artist, in response to the levelling of many similar houses in favour of 1960s- and 1970s-style apartment blocks in modern Seoul.
I Found Myself . . . The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz — reveries from Cairo

1 week ago | ft.com | Boyd Tonkin

Sleep, it seems, may whisk even Nobel laureates into the same sort of fantasy realm as ordinary folk.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann — illuminating the shadows of the past

2 weeks ago | ft.com | Boyd Tonkin

In the depths of winter, a thin girl — barely 16 — flies alone from New York to Paris.
Anselm Kiefer at eighty

2 weeks ago | the-tls.co.uk | Boyd Tonkin

Walk up the main staircase of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and you enter, at the top, a sort of bombed-out Byzantine basilica that has somehow been commandeered as a war-zone quartermaster’s stores. Caked in clay and paint, ruined uniforms (some, disturbingly, child-sized) hang from racks. Radiant but distressed sheets of gold leaf on the walls carry images of Indian women at work and the heads of Greek philosophers.
News from a small island: Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed

1 month ago | spectator.com.au | Boyd Tonkin

Theft Bloomsbury, pp.246, 18.99 In 2021, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature made Abdulrazak Gurnah the world’s second-best-known Zanzibari – after a certain Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury. Forgive the flippant comparison, but the pop world’s perplexity over Queen’s vocalist’s origins feels germane to the quest for a coherent self and story undertaken by the Nobel laureate’s chief characters.
The stinking truth about England's rivers

1 month ago | unherd.com | Boyd Tonkin

Is a River Alive?Liberal DemocratsNet ZeroPollutionRiversSocietyUK Near the end of his new book, Robert Macfarlane has an epiphany.Â Is a River Alive?Â takes the writer and ecological activist on a trio of journeys far from his Cambridge home: to the cloud-forests of Ecuador and their âsteaming, glowing furnace of greenâ, to the poisoned streams and lakes of Chennai in India and, at last, to the roiling torrents of the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie, river in eastern Canada. Next to the spume...
The stinking truth about England’s rivers

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Boyd Tonkin

4 hours agoChina is on the move in Latin America, and America is taking notice. China and oil-rich Ecuador recently signed a 20-year oil production contract, giving China’s state-owned Sinopec access to the Sacha oil field. The deal would have enabled Ecuador to access the funds and technology necessary to …
The stinking truth about England's rivers

1 month ago | unherd.com | Boyd Tonkin

Is a River Alive?Liberal DemocratsNet ZeroPollutionRiversSocietyUK Near the end of his new book, Robert Macfarlane has an epiphany. Is a River Alive? takes the writer and ecological activist on a trio of journeys far from his Cambridge home: to the cloud-forests of Ecuador and their “steaming, glowing furnace of green”, to the poisoned streams and lakes of Chennai in India and, at last, to the roiling torrents of the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie, river in eastern Canada.