# 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
- [Authors "evicted" from Big Brother Amazon reach out to Local Bookstores](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/authors-evicted-from-big-brother-amazon-reach-out-to-local-bookstores): When Amazon shuts a self-published author's account, every title leaves the store overnight. More than a thousand independent bookshops, new ebook routes and Rich Books Magazine offer another way to readers.
- [Michael Woodford Still Gave His Exam the Morning He Won the Nobel Prize](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/michael-woodford-still-gave-his-exam-the-morning-he-won-the-nobel-prize): Woken at 4.30am with news of his Nobel Prize, the Columbia economist went to collect his students' exam papers. What the 2026 laureate teaches you about steady habits, and why your expectations shape what happens next.
- [Robert Hall Turned the Question Upside Down: How a Stanford Economist Won the Nobel Prize](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/robert-hall-turned-the-question-upside-down-how-a-stanford-economist-won-the-nobel-prize): Economists searched for years for a way to predict how much households would spend. Robert E. Hall asked the opposite question, and changed economics. What the 2026 Nobel laureate teaches you about reframing a problem.
- [Navi Pillay Opened Her Own Door: The Courage Behind the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/navi-pillay-opened-her-own-door-the-courage-behind-the-2026-nobel-peace-prize): No law firm would give her a place, so in 1967 she founded her own. Fifty-nine years later, the judge from Durban has won the Nobel Peace Prize. What her life teaches you about courage and self-belief.
- [Anne Carson Turned Ancient Fragments Into New Forms: What Her Nobel Prize Says About Your Own Voice](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/anne-carson-turned-ancient-fragments-into-new-forms-what-her-nobel-prize-says-about-your-own-voice): The Canadian poet and classicist took broken lines of Greek poetry and made something no one had seen before. What the 2026 Nobel laureate in literature teaches you about inheritance, imagination and finding your own form.
- [Kenso Soai Spent Eight More Years on One Reaction: The Patience Behind a Nobel Prize](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/kenso-soai-spent-eight-more-years-on-one-reaction-the-patience-behind-a-nobel-prize): A chemist from Hiroshima turned a two per cent head start into a reaction that only life itself had managed before. What the 2026 Nobel laureate teaches you about patience and small advantages.
- [Henri Kagan Questioned What Every Chemist Assumed, and Won the Nobel Prize at 95](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/henri-kagan-questioned-what-every-chemist-assumed-and-won-the-nobel-prize-at-95): In 1986 a Paris chemist stopped to think about something everyone took for granted. Forty years later, his discovery has earned the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. What his story teaches you about thinking for yourself.
- [Francis Halzen Bet on Antarctic Ice, and Surprise, Not Pride, Kept Him Going](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/francis-halzen-bet-on-antarctic-ice-and-surprise-not-pride-kept-him-going): In 1988 a Belgian-born physicist proposed catching ghostly particles from deep space in the ice of the South Pole. What the 2026 Nobel laureate in physics teaches you about chasing a vision that seems impossible.
- [Georg Nagel Kept Going Until the Signal Came: The Persistence Behind a Nobel Prize](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/georg-nagel-kept-going-until-the-signal-came-the-persistence-behind-a-nobel-prize): The 2026 Nobel laureate in medicine heard the news on a sunny terrace in Italy, surrounded by olive trees. Behind that moment lie years of patient work, one lucky mistake and a generous spirit.
- [Peter Hegemann Asked How a Tiny Alga Finds the Light, and His Curiosity Won a Nobel Prize](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/peter-hegemann-asked-how-a-tiny-alga-finds-the-light-and-his-curiosity-won-a-nobel-prize): A question first asked in 1866 about green algae in the river Neva led to one of neuroscience's greatest tools. Why the 2026 Nobel laureate tells young scientists to work on something new.
- [Karl Deisseroth Still Sees His Patients: The Nobel Psychiatrist Who Turned Light Into a Switch for the Brain](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/karl-deisseroth-still-sees-his-patients-the-nobel-psychiatrist-who-turned-light-into-a-switch-for-th): The 2026 Nobel laureate in medicine runs a laboratory, teaches, raises a house full of children and still treats people with mental illness. What his work teaches you about the mind and empathy.
- [A Century After Rilke's Death, Letters to a Young Poet Is Still the Book Writers Pass to Each Other](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/a-century-after-rilke-s-death-letters-to-a-young-poet-is-still-the-book-writers-pass-to-each-other): Rainer Maria Rilke died on 29th December 1926. The ten letters he sent a 19-year-old cadet who hoped to be a poet are still the way most readers find him.
- [Monet Offered France His Water Lilies the Day After the Armistice and Died Before Paris Saw Them](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/monet-offered-france-his-water-lilies-the-day-after-the-armistice-and-died-before-paris-saw-them): Claude Monet died at Giverny on 5th December 1926, half blind and still painting. A century later his Water Lilies fill Paris, and next year they come to Tate Modern.
- [Agatha Christie Disappeared for Eleven Days in December 1926, and the Fullest Account She Left Is a Novel](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/agatha-christie-disappeared-for-eleven-days-in-december-1926-and-the-fullest-account-she-left-is-a-n): A century after the Queen of Crime drove away from Sunningdale and turned up in Harrogate as Teresa Neele, the clearest clues to those eleven days sit in the books she wrote afterwards.
- [John Berger's A Fortunate Man, the 1967 Portrait of a Country Doctor That Still Sends People Into Medicine](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/john-berger-a-fortunate-man): On John Berger's centenary, his book about a Forest of Dean GP has a second life: a doctor in the same practice today chose medicine after reading it at 17.
- [U2 Close Carnaval De Luz, Their First Album in Nine Years, With Dolly Parton's Last Recorded Vocal](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/u2-carnaval-de-luz-dolly-parton): U2's 16th album arrives on 13th November with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois back in the studio, a song written for Rosalía and a duet Dolly Parton left her sickbed to record.
- [Dickens's Writing Chalet Joins England's Heritage at Risk Register Five Months After a £240,000 Rescue Grant](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/dickens-writing-chalet-heritage-at-risk): The flat-pack Swiss chalet where Charles Dickens wrote his last pages is now too fragile to enter, and Historic England has put it on its 2026 at-risk list.
- [Born Creative, Not Consumers: How Stories Keep the Gift Alive](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/born-creative-not-consumers): Every child arrives making things up. In this November edition, the writers, filmmakers and poets who never stopped show how stories build new worlds, teach empathy and grow slowly over years.
- [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.

## Reference
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