James Meek is a contributing editor at the LRB. His new novel, Your Life without Me, will be published in 2026.
The authorities in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy...
One morning in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs. His phone was stolen; he told the police but there was an...
We needed a new bathroom, and found some plumbers – interesting, attractive young men with remarkable stories to tell about their lives and travels around the world. The most interesting of them – S.’s sister described him as ‘a hot mess’ – went home after work one evening having forgotten to tighten a nut, which led to a leak and the near collapse of...
Mass murder at a Moscow light entertainment venue, where 140 people were gunned down at point blank range as they gathered to watch the nostalgic rock of the elderly band Picnic, may have promoted the long hand of Islamic State Khurasan Province to donors and potential recruits, but it changes nothing for the organisation where it most wants things to change, at home.
When General Valery Zaluzhny, then Ukraine’s senior military commander, spoke in November of a stalemate, it was widely taken in the West as a signal that the war was frozen in all but name: that Ukraine and Russia had reached their fighting limits, that Russia could invade no further and Ukraine could liberate no more. Ukraine’s southern summer counteroffensive had fallen far...
James Meek talks to Tom about the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the fall of Yanukovych to the wars in the Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh, and considers what may happen next.
James Meek reports from Mykolaiv and the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve occupied west of the...
James Meek, recently returned from Mykolaiv, talks to Tom about the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve...
James Meek reads from his piece on the British army’s eight years in Afghanistan.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
James Meek talks to Chris Bickerton about his new book, Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, which features writing published originally in the LRB.
Tony Wood talks to James Meek about his book Russia with Putin, which looks at, among other things, the legacy of Soviet infrastructure and the extent of political opposition in today’s Russia.
David Runciman talks to James Meek about what the Covid crisis has revealed about how we understand healthcare and how we think about the organisations tasked with delivering it. Their conversation covers...
James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and...
James Meek’s early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness – as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and...
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