Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Chris Newens

2017 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
In this quest across India during the recent cash crisis, Chris Newens follows in the footsteps of TV chef Rick Stein in search of divine truth and the perfect curry. Steeped in the smells and colours of south India, Cash and Curry is a brilliantly funny and intelligent journey of discovery that muses on the love of food, various incarnations of godliness, the power of belief and the true meaning of value.

Cash and Curry

An Unlikely Pilgrimage

Saranya Subramanian

RUNNER-UP OF THE 2020 BODLEY HEAD / FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
'It's an exhausting, futile battle, really. Every night, the same smug cockroach squeezes herself out of my bathroom drain's grilled lid, scuttles into the toilet and shower area, and waltzes around like she owns the place.' 
 
The Cockroach and I is an astonishingly vivid, funny, trenchant portrait of life in Bombay in 2020 during the pandemic. It is alive to the nameless and the numberless of the city, alive to history, and alive to the special strangeness of a year of living surrounded by death and uncertainty. 
 
Here are innumerable human beings pushed inside their homes while insects and animals roam freely, each playing their roles.

The Cockroach and I

E. S. Batchelor

2019 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
‘Where are you going? 
 
The voice came again, and two figures appeared … It was clear that these men were not working for the government. They wore green uniforms, with the small red logo of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army. As they walked, their rifles flopped from side to side.’ 
 
In Myanmar, E. S. Batchelor travels the highland road leading out of Burma to China. Encounters with other travellers unveil political tensions and military history, posing questions about the borderlands between past and present, peace and conflict, person and state.

Highway Three

On the road through Burma’s opium fields

Adnan Sarwar

It isn't nice but you're an animal, so you can do it, dressed in green and brown and black waiting to be attacked and smiling because you had bullets for teeth. 
 
 Adnan Sarwar, a Pakistani boy from Burnley, joined the British Army – the White Man’s Army. Why did he do it? To prove he was as white as his friends? For Queen and Country? Or to work out who he was – British, Muslim or a Soldier? Perhaps he could be all three. 
 
 ‘British Muslim Soldier’ is Adnan’s journey through the battlegrounds of war, race and identity, facing up to the often brutal realities of these fraught warzones. There is racism, family ties, tedious routine, enemies and torture. But what Adnan’s story really comes down to is love – love for his family, for his fellow squaddies – and a deep-rooted sense of identity and belonging. 
 
 …when did these clothes fit so well? When did Corporal become an older brother and when did the army become a mother? When did I become a British soldier?

British Muslim Soldier

Frances Woodsford

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline. 
 
The 'Saturday Specials' as Frances dubbed them, are brilliantly-packed missives, sparked with comic genius, from post-war England. We follow her travails at the Baths (and her ghastly boss Mr Bond); the hilarious weekly Civil Defence classes as the Cold War advances; her attempts to shake off Dr Russell, an unwanted suitor; life at home with Mother, and Mac, her charming ne'er-do-well brother; and escapades in their jointly-owned car, a 1934 Ford 8 called Hesperus. 
 
Most importantly, we get to know Frances - and her deep affection for Mr Bigelow. She started to write to him as a way of thanking his daughter for the clothes and food parcels she sent. But what had begun as a good turn offered Frances the chance to escape a trying job, and to expound with elegance, wit and verve on topical subjects from home and abroad, bringing us a beady commentary on her life and times that leaps vividly from the page. Her letters to Mr Bigelow during his final illness are a tender and moving farewell, a touching conclusion to a unique record.

Dear Mr Bigelow

A Transatlantic Friendship

Snigdha Poonam

In a small rural town in India, a female police officer, known as Lady Singham, has achieved local fame for one thing: she has made it her professional and personal mission to launch a violent attack on love. 
 
Before her arrival, no one had even seen a female police officer riding a motorbike. But now she is indispensable to the community. She prowls the streets and public places – parks, bars, cafés – looking for couples who are kissing, holding hands or simply in the same place at the same time. Her solutions range from violent beating to on-the-spot weddings and her work is praised by everyone. 
 
In a country that is modernising and growing at an astounding rate, concerns about morality are rife; with young people glorifying big-city culture and Bollywood films, many feel that Lady Singham’s justice is more necessary than ever. 
 
Through extraordinary first-hand reportage, Lady Singham's Mission Against Love provides an unusual and surprising insight into small-town Indian life.

Lady Singham's Mission Against Love

Iris Murdoch

EDITED BY AVRIL HORNER AND ANNE ROWE 
 
‘Destroy this and all letters. And keep your mouth shut’ 
 
This collection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and revealing letters gives us a living portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch grappling with philosophical questions, as well as feeling her anguish when a novel obstinately refuses to come together. 
 
They uncover Murdoch’s famed personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its intriguing complexity, and her penchant for living beyond the bounds of social acceptability. We also begin to see the 'real life material' that fed into her fiction, despite her claims that her fiction never drew on reality. Above all we see the accumulation of life – intimate, irreverent, fiercely engaged with the world – in this extraordinary collection of letters.

Living on Paper

Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

Thomas Graham

2019 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
‘In the Andean cultural context, the mouth of the mine is a portal between worlds. Outside, the miners are Catholic. Inside, the human soul has escaped the jurisdiction of God.’ 
 
In this searing investigation, Thomas Graham crosses the Bolivian altiplano and ventures into Siglo XX, once the world’s richest tin mine. Describing the historical and political landscape of this near post-apocalyptic world, he is invited into the local mining community where he uncovers the true costs it has exacted on their lives.

The Sacrifice

How Bolivian miners extract their wealth

Rosemary Ashton

They were the most remarkable couple in London: the great sage Carlyle, with his vehement prophecies, and his witty, sardonic wife Jane.  It was a strong, close, mutually admiring yet often mutually antagonistic partnership, fascinating to all who observed it. The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders, a largely self-educated Scottish pair who took a sometimes caustic look at the society they so influenced - Carlyle through his copious writings, and both through their network of acquaintances and correspondents.  Carlyle's fame was confirmed by his Sartor Resartus of 1843, The French Revolution, his lectures on heroes and hero-worship and by his radical account of contemporary industrial Britain in Past and Present, 1843.  Both husband and wife were great letter-writers, Carlyle commenting on the matters of the day, dashing off pen portraits of those he met and Jane with her brilliant stories and her sharp, dry humour.  Yet despite her brilliance, Jane suffered, especially from Carlyle's infatuation with the lion-hunting Lady Ashburton, and the tensions in their marriage grew.  The letters they wrote, both to each other and to others, make theirs the most well-documented marriage of the nineteenth century and give us an unequalled portrait of a famously unhappy marriage. This moving and vivid biography describes their relationship with each other, from their first meeting in 1821 to Jane's death in 1866, and also their relationship with the world outside.  Rosemary Ashton's inimitable blend of rigorous scholarship, warm sensitivity and lively wit makes this not only a portrait of a marriage but a picture of a whole age, elegant, erudite and entertaining.

Thomas And Jane Carlyle

Portrait of a Marriage

Nina Lyon

'Mushroom Season' is a ramble through magic mushrooms, mountains and metaphysics. After heavy sanctions relegated their use to a spell in the stoner wilderness, are psilocybin mushrooms about to help reframe important social and philosophical debates about our minds, and ourselves? 
 
Where do they grow? What do they do to our brains? And why are they eschewed by the bourgois? Nina Lyon introduces us to Liberty Caps and Fly Agarics, the characters she encountered as a student tripper and the differences between home-grown hallucinogens and Mexican export. 
 
Among the anecdotes and observations are chemical facts, etymological revelations and philosophical speculation. Why are mushrooms subject to social stigma? What are the good effects they might have on us? And how does illegalisation damage a culture of free-thinking and experiment? Taking apart the teenage clichés and middle-class prejudice associated with the drug, Nina Lyon provides a wonderfully entertaining history of the magic mushroom.

Mushroom Season

Abhishek Mukherjee

2017 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
In this sharp, witty essay, written from inside the Indian banking system, we witness the absurdities and mundanities of corruption and bureaucracy, set against a backdrop of modern urban India. In a personal battle with his moustachioed boss, Mukherjee illuminates a Kafkaesque system of compliance inherited from the British Raj and shows us how to walk away from it laughing.

Stranger in a Strange Land

100 Days in the Credit Analysis Department of an Indian Bank

Virginia Woolf

Fiction was the core of Virginia Woolf's work. But she took her essay writing very seriously, spending a great deal of time on each essay and finding they provided a refreshing diversion from fiction. Her essays informed her fiction, and vice versa; this volume shows her thinking about the possibility of poeticising the novel (The Waves was the result) and in some of these pieces ('Women and Fiction', 'Women and Leisure') she considers the relationship between women, writing and society - the preoccupation that would become such a large part of her legacy. 
 
The Common Reader: Second Series comprises a significant part of this volume - it was first published in 1932 to excellent reviews. ('They are wholly delightful. They are sensitive, acute, picturesque, humorous, and yet severe.' Vita Sackville-West; 'Is there anybody writing anywhere in the world at this moment who could surpass the essay...so beautifully moulded into a form appropriate to its content that what is an authentic critical masterpiece seems as light on the mind as a song?' Rebecca West) This collection shows Woolf's genius as a critic and essayist: as well as displaying her perceptive understanding of writers and their work, it also offers us an important insight into her creative mind. 
 
Continuing the work of former editor Andrew McNeillie, Stuart N. Clarke brings fresh light to Woolf's essays and enriches them with variations. This penultimate volume forms part of an indispensable, unique collection from one of our greatest writers.

The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5

1929 - 1932

Mark Clemens

2018 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
With honesty and humour, Mark Clemens describes lessons he learned from a honeymoon spent recovering from terrible sickness in a Manhattan hotel room. Years later he considers the complex history of the building in which he and his new bride spent their convalescence. A carpentry shop, a brothel, a butcher's. As Mark reflects on the impermanence of New York and the impermanence of his marriage, he offers insights on history and personal growth.

In Sickness and In Health

Historical Notes from an Attempted Honeymoon

David Marr

From the time when he was a little boy, Patrick White wrote letters - brilliant, gossipy, funny, angry, heartfelt letters. When he died in 1990 at the age of 78, between 2, 500 and 3, 000 of them survived, scattered - and often treasured - all over the world. In the course of producing his much-admired biography of White, David Marr tracked down most of them. Now, with sensitivity and skill, he has assembled a rich selection from the letters to present a fascinating portrait of White in his unihibited words - as a writer, as a friend (or enemy), as a man deeply and painfully engaged with his world.

The Letters Of Patrick White

A. S. Byatt

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

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