What is literature for?

We should start owning our reading and asking more serious questions about what place literary education has in our collective life today.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for the The New Statesman

(French philosopher Simone Weil with her staff number when she worked in the Renault factory c1934-35 © Bridgeman Images)

‘People are reading more during the pandemic. But it is wrong to think we are reading simply to escape a grim reality. Reading is more radical than we give it credit for. It always has been. What we do with its power is another matter...’

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