Nadia Beard

We’re delighted to reveal the cover for The Melody of Things: On Returning to Forgotten Joys by @nadiawbeard 🎹 How do we lose touch with the things we love? And is it possible to find our way back to them? These are the pressing questions which drive Nadia on a quest to reclaim the dreams of her childhood for her adult self. Many, if not most of us, set aside the pursuits of youth once the reality of working life sets in, leaving the joys and skills of those days far in our slipstream. The Melody of Things depicts what coming back to those early loves entails, as Beard uproots her life to return to study the piano, years after she had stopped playing as a teenager. Beard explores the pleasures, frustrations and revelations of re-dedicating herself to the instrument as an amateur. Her story is an invitation: to seek out the restorative power waiting to be discovered in the pieces of ourselves we have, perhaps unknowingly, lost to time. Proofs are now in for this beautiful book, publishing 10 September 📚

What a joy to spend weeks reading Ama Ata Aidoo’s books, then spend an afternoon at the Miu Miu Literary Club thinking about her work, the politics of desire and maximum love experiences (see: obsession). A challenging, at times contradictory writer, so brilliant because of how challenging and contradictory she renders her subjects: desire and the quest to be free. Thanks to wonderful panellists @wayetu @ondina17 and Gloria Wekker, and of course to the one @thecoldfield for curating such thoughtful conversations. If you haven’t read Aidoo’s work yet, now’s your chance!

I went to Rome last week for the @ft_weekend to spend some time with Henry Taylor — painter, portraitist, observer of life. It’s gratifying to talk to successful people who remind you that talent is essentially meaningless without hard work. Taylor became an artist relatively late - in his 30s - supporting himself by working at a psychiatric hospital. A lot of the patients there became his subjects. Taylor often depicts black experience but says he doesn’t represent it, just as he says he’s a political person but not a political artist. That’s a self-aware distinction I think is key to why the black experience and politics in his paintings ring true. It was amusing to hear him talk about his high achieving brothers (he’s one of eight) as a reason for him to get into painting, given he’s now probably one of the most influential contemporary painters in America. “They were like track stars, they were real good at things. I said, damn, what am I going to do? I wanted to be good at something.” The most endearing and appreciated outtake is in the last slide. Thanks, Henry, for the cheerleading. Nina Simone, here I come! Link in stories

There’s something about getting older that, at least to me, means a growing curiosity about my origin. The end of two weeks in Bangkok, visiting my mother’s old haunts, reunions with cousins, a first encounter with my great-aunt, at last! I can’t remember much, aside from my grandmother’s house, from when we came as children, and even if I did, the city has changed so much it’s almost unrecognisable from back then. But all these years later, the thing that instantly brings me back to a familiar childhood city: the smell! Frying food, drains, the particular, thick scent of both mixed together out on the street — unmistakably of this place. Reluctantly trading in daily som tam with pasta but as they say, back to life, back to reality...

I always assumed that if I wrote a book it would be like my reporting: about other people’s lives. In fact, the book I’ve ended up writing is very personal, about music, relearning and the ideas that have shaped my life as a journalist-musician. It’s called THE MELODY OF THINGS and it’ll be out in the UK with @faberbooks in September 2026 and the US with @w.w.norton in Jan 2027! Writing this book was one of the hardest things I’ve done, which is funny, because the book is about the other hardest thing I’ve done, which was move country to enrol — at the ripe old age of 31 (and alongside 18 year olds!) — in a music conservatoire and retrain to become a pianist while working as a journalist. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I ever had the energy and determination to commit to something that took so much time and for which progress was so slow and non-linear, but somehow I did. I have so few videos of me playing but I found this one, from 2019, of me impatiently practicing my audition programme in a basement in London. It’s from the first movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata. About 6 months after this video, and hours and hours of practice later, I got an acceptance email from Tbilisi Conservatoire and off I went! I’m mostly out of words now, but thanks to everyone who carried me through my mad plan to become a pianist again, and writing this book. Cover coming soon! Thanks also to @hanaiskno at Faber and the wonderful team at Norton for keeping me busy for the last two years ✨❤️ 📷: @davidemonteleonestudio 🙏🏽

Kandinsky: painter, synesthete. A couple of weeks ago, I spent an afternoon at the @philharmoniedeparis to “listen” to Kandinsky’s paintings. Or rather, look at his paintings while listening to the music that inspired them, and essentially the birth of abstraction. Kandinsky saw colours when he heard music and vice versa. The paintings in the exhibition are paired with the works of music he listened to at the time (there’s a lot of Schoenberg). I don’t have synesthesia but am fascinated by people who do, and suspect we might be able to learn something from the interconnected way they experience the world. At least, after 3 hours of looking and listening, that’s what I began to think. I wrote an essay for @ft_weekend on that interconnectedness. Thanks @horatiaharrod for a very fun assignment! (And if you’re in Paris before Feb 1, go to the philarmonie to look and listen!) 🎨🎵

Two essays written by Milan Kundera in the 1980s have just been translated into English for the first time. The first is a self-styled personal dictionary. Some entries are elegant micro-essays, others read like moral aphorisms disguised as lexicography. Others still are hilarious (see: Smile, though plenty more in the book, including Coat Rack, Get Hard & Pseudonym). So much about writing about culture of the past is, at this point in time, an experience of feeling chastened by how much we haven’t learned. Anyway, reading these essays was both fun and provocative. These are a few favourite entries that made me think, or at least made me smile.  I wrote about them for the FT this week. Link in bio.

ZEG came to London! What a thrill and honour to be in conversation with @kuminaidoo , who after a lifetime of activism ever since anti-apartheid protests in South Africa, is still an incredible optimist. Just the best team and a fascinating, talented group of speakers and friends. Oh, and the legendary @tekunia came all the way from Tbilisi to feed us! A wonderful day and night (and subsequent hangover to prove it) ❤️✨❤️✨

〰️Nadia Beard [ @nadiawbeard ] has spent her career between writing and music, moving to Georgia a few years ago as a journalist and leaving as a pianist. While retraining at Tbilisi Conservatoire, she reported for publications including The New Yorker and the Financial Times. Her writing often crosses disciplines, making connections between the politics of our world and the artistic language used to describe it. She was a Moscow Correspondent for The Independent and spent several years as Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning publication The Calvert Journal. She is now Managing Editor at Coda Story and Program Director at ZEG Fest. Her first book will be published in 2026. 👉FULL PROGRAM in BIO 🗓️October 18, 2025 🪑Limited seats available 🎟️More Info and Tickets in BIO #ZEGLondon #StoriesThatConnectUs #ZEGOnTheRoad #ZEGNetwork

There are few things that conjure the confusion, false steps and utter bewilderment of childhood as learning a new language as an adult and beginning to try to speak it. My misadventures in Italian led me to Venice, a city of incredible beauty despite the deluge of tourists, where I’ve spent a week of self-imposed language “immersion” in the wonderful company of Paola and Stefano, whose daily goingsabout I shared for the time I was there. We went to the beach, the fish market, cafes, wandered the Vatican Chapels, ate pizza, hosted a dinner party, and in 4 (!) instances - not pictured here, alas - I led a yoga “class” at home in Italian while also trying to demonstrate. Patience incarnate. Grazie mille @pasqualpaola and Stefano per la generosità, buon umore, bella compania e sopratutto la vostra pazienza. La prossima volta, promesso di usare i pronomi diretti perfettamente! 🤓

Another year of beloved @zegfest . Bigger than any previous edition and in a year that becomes more calamitous everyday, all the more poignant and all the more fun. Thanks to the many brave and indefatigable journalists, humanitarians, doctors, artists, satirists, actors, lawyers, architects, photographers and many others who commit to their work no matter what and shared their stories. A joy and privilege to be in your company!🫶🏽

Why work on your own book when you can write about other people’s? I wrote the FT books essay on two new ones: one about how technology has changed music through the ages, and another about grief and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Which is to say, I wrote an essay on what extreme constraints and changing environments do to the act of creating. (And listened to the Quartet about 100 times in the process). Link in bio. Ps. If you haven’t listened to Quartet for the End of Time, quick!