Chris Power

𝘛𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘯. Novelist Chris Power reads from The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, at our Night of Pleasure event, live at the Conduit.

Program update! Writer Chris Power (A Lonely Man, Mothers) will join Karl Ove Knausgård and Glenn Kotche at the Barbican on March 5 to host an artist conversation following their Historia performance. This shared evening of words and music celebrates collaboration, craft, and friendship—accompanied by visuals from director Johan Renck. Get tickets at the link in bio.

January was so busy I completely forgot I was on TV discussing, not my inability to lower my hands, but the writing of Karl Ove Knausgård. Link in bio.

More than a few times in the last couple of years I’ve heard people say that those not from the Middle East shouldn’t comment on it - that it’s a ‘complex’ situation they don’t understand. Thank goodness then (if you even accept that opinion, which I don’t) for explanatory books like this one by Göran Rosenberg. In it this Sweden-born son of Holocaust survivors describes his journey from Zionist to staunch critic of the Israeli state and its treatment of the Palestinian people. If you want to learn more about the region’s last 78 years and beyond, from the origins of Zionism to the military, legal and political machinations used to deprive Palestinians of their land and their rights of citizenship - in other words apartheid, or (in fact especially) if you think his assertions are fantasies born of hatred and prejudice, I urge you to read this book. A link to the full review is in my bio.

Our New Review cover this week: Siddhartha Mukherjee, the biographer of cancer writes a new chapter. The first thing @chrisjohnpower does when Siddhartha Mukherjee logs on to their call is thank him for helping him quit smoking. When he read Mukherjee’s Pulitzer prize-winning history of cancer, “The Emperor of All Maladies”, in the autumn of 2011, he had been a smoker for a quarter of a century and had no intention of stopping; 500 pages later, he went cold turkey. He didn’t know then that, 12 years later, the book would become relevant for a completely different reason. Mukherjee, speaking from California, tells Power he is well aware of the book’s impact on readers because he continues to receive emails from them. “The plaudits and prizes are great,” he says, “but there’s nothing more moving, and sort of deeply satisfying, than to wake up in the morning and read a random email saying: ‘Thank you for this book.’” In this must read interview Mukherjee tells Power, also cancer survivor, why the disease is and always will be a part of who we are. Pick up a copy of @theobserveruk on Sunday, or read on our website - link in bio. Portrait by @mspann Photo editor @cherylnewman1 The new edition of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is published by 4th Estate. To order a copy for £11.69 go to the observershop.co.uk. Delivery charges may apply

It was an intense experience to revisit The Emperor of All Maladies ahead of talking to its remarkable author, Siddhartha Mukherjee for @theobserveruk . It brought to the surface a lot of thoughts and feelings about my own cancer, a compressed account of which features in the piece. Thanks to @tom.gatti for commissioning me to write it, to @evavermandel for the photograph of me at Bart’s a month or so after receiving the CAR T treatment that saved my life, and thanks to you, if you feel so minded, for reading. Link in bio.

In the 1980s Soraya Antonius published two novels set in 30s and 40s Palestine. In this week’s @obsnewreview piece I write about the first of them, The Lord, reissued by @nyrbooks . It’s a brilliant novel, a dark and gripping account of a figurative and literal noose slowly being drawn tight around a Palestinian leader. But what I want to draw attention to here is that I close the piece with a line @williamdalrymple wrote in a review of Antonius’s second novel, Where the Jinn Consult, in 1988. A line that unbelievably, devastatingly, despairingly, remains as relevant today as when he wrote it 37 years ago.

My review of the third part of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume - one of the most exciting things happening in fiction right now - is up at @theobserveruk . Link in bio.

These two tablets are aciclovir (an antiviral) and co-trimoxazole (a combination antibiotic to fight bacterial infection). I took them yesterday, the last of my supply, and I’ve been told I don’t need to refill the prescription. That makes this the first day in three years (OK, 35 months) when I won’t take any cancer or cancer-related medication. 2. My week throughout most of 2023 & 2024 3. My rejected cover for Helen Garner’s Diaries 15/07/23 4. Footage I’d forgotten existed. This is 14/04/23, the day after my cancer was diagnosed as lymphoma and I was moved to Bart’s. I’d spent the previous 3 weeks in Homerton, and a month before that visiting the day unit there while everyone tried to figure out what this large growth in or on my stomach actually was. The steroids I swallow in this video kicked off an 18-week chemo treatment. Things got better and then a lot worse, the cancer coming back in February 2024 and putting me in hospital for another 5 weeks, and then in and out of it for much of that year. But this was essentially the first step on a long path to remission, which is where I am now. I’m well aware not everyone is so fortunate, and I’m sorry to anyone for whom this post triggers difficult emotions. Thank you again to my brilliant haematologist Jessica Okosun and my care teams at Bart’s, the Royal London and Homerton, to all my friends and family - most of all the incredible @sjarnfors - and to everyone who reached out to me during this whole experience. I won’t ever be able to thank you all enough.

@thebookerprizes 2025 in pictures - a very partial account 1. Our first meeting (© @neogilder for Booker Prize Foundation) 2. Books 3. and more books (many additional boxes of books not pictured) 4. My near-constant reading companion 5 & 6. Our final monthly meeting 7 & 8. KR, SJ and Fia in Hackney (Ayòbámi, Roddy and assorted family members not pictured) 9. The longlist meeting 10. Choosing a longlist is hard. Riding home afterwards when someone’s chained their bike to yours is impossible 11. Gaby and me before our @latitudefest event 12. Rereading the longlist (which I did in many far less picturesque locations too) 13. About to go onstage at @southbankcentre for the shortlist announcement 14. Our shortlist: 6 books I would encourage anyone to read 15. 🙏 @loewe . I owe you @carrie.l.rees ! 16-19. the ceremony (© David Parry for Booker Prize Foundation) 20. Clarence House with the winner of the Booker Prize 2025, David Szalay

One of the great experiences of my reading life is over. Thank you to @gabywoodbooks for asking me to be a judge for this year’s @thebookerprizes alongside the best readers and people I could have hoped for: @theayobamiadebayo , @sarahjessicaparker , @kileyreid , and our warm, wise and forensic chair Roddy Doyle. We will forever be his gang of gobshites. Thank you so much to @misshandavies , Zoe Sanders and the wider Booker team, all of whom have taken such good care of me that I’m now entirely incapable of doing anything for myself. And lastly, and most importantly, thank you to our winner David Szalay, and to all the shortlisted and longlisted authors whose extraordinary books fuelled our discussions and made this year one I’ll always be proud of and astounded by: @claireadamwriter , @tash.aw , @wordsbynatasha , Jonathan Buckley, @susanmchoi , Kiran Desai, @_katiekitamura , Ben Markovits, @andrewmiller4530 , @revawrites , Benjamin Wood and @lediaxhoga . 📸: @sjarnfors

I’ve always been suspicious of the neatness with which some essayists’ lives are presented in their work. It’s almost as if… they’re making it up. Or at least giving the facts a deep tissue massage. What really impressed me about Emily LaBarge’s debut, Dog Days - aside from her significant analytical skills when it comes to art, literature and film - is the way it refuses to plane off the rough edges of her experiences, even if that makes them ungainly and difficult to present in a book. For this type of writing it’s the path less taken, which is why I wanted to write about it. And yes, I did resist adding a parenthetical ‘salt’ to the previous sentence. Link on my stories/in bio.