| Hay festival: Kamila Shamsie, Reza Aslan and Charles Darwin’s writings
The final Haycast from the 2009 Guardian Hay festival opens with an interview with one of the festival’s most highly-anticipated authors, Kamila Shamsie. Her novel Burnt Shadows, which opens in Nagasaki on the morning of the atomic bomb and closes in a US gripped by anti-Islamic fervour following the attacks on the twin towers, is shortlisted for this year’s Orange prize. She talks about grand narratives, tackling the tensions between the west and Islam in fiction and why Pakistani literature is having its moment in the sun.
Reza Aslan’s first book, No god but God, was translated into 13 languages and shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. He talks to Xan Brooks about his new book, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror – an academic study of the issues Shamsie grapples with in her novel.
Finally, the poet Ruth Padel, the scientist Steve Jones and Cambridge University’s Gillian Beer discuss what Darwin’s written legacy reveals about him, John Crace offers another take on the festival’s stock characters, and Kate Adie reveals her guilty reading pleasure.
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