From the start, Anna Lidia’s path has been one of defiance and reinvention. Born in Leningrad in 1968, to a Russian-Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, she arrived in Havana in 1989. There she came to be seen as one of the most distinctive voices in Cuban literature. In 1997 she won Cuba’s prestigious Premio David for her first collection of short stories, Bad Painting, a title that announced her taste for irony, play and provocation – as well as her own distinctively naïve painting style. Not only is she an accomplished writer, but also a painter and translator. An artist whose work bridges continents, cultures and genres.

There are several definitions of what constitutes a landscape, depending on context. In common usage however, a landscape refers either to all the visible features of an area of land, often rural historically but increasingly urban. And considered in  terms of its aesthetic appeal. It might be a pictorial –  painting or photo – or a written description which represents the landscape. And often features not just naturally occurring elements but also humans and the structures or interventions they’ve made like farms, animals, crops, roads, bridges, villages, castles, harbours or mines.

A review of a beautifully written new memoir, “Highlife & my other lives”, and an interview with its author, Richard Walker, by Jeffrey Streeter

(This was first published on the Substack, @englishrepublicofletters)

Last September, we were just taking our seats in the New Theatre, Oxford to see Patti Smith when my phone beeped. It was a timely reminder to turn it off.  Which I did and then forgot about it in the anticipation and enjoyment of listening to a poet and rock ‘n’ roll performer who Bob Dylan asked to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature. Patti sang ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ a second time after she broke down not long into the first performance. After her heartwarming show, we strolled between the Sheldonian Theatre and Blackwells/Weston Library under the Bridge of Sighs heading down Queen’s Lane. A street I love, especially at night, for its peace and lamps flickering on the mellow stone of All Souls.

I first met Rodney backstage at the South London Theatre, as I was just embarking on my own short-lived acting career. As I recall, it was a production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I had a very minor part, which barely warranted a credit, and so there was a lot of hanging around waiting for a brief moment in the limelight. Rodney was an assistant stage manager, and I forget how we began to talk – but as soon as we did, we found that we understood one another.

I came across the source for The Hobby by chance in an airport lounge, watching a satellite interview with a detective from Scotland Yard describing how he tracked down a gang of high-ranking British paedophiles by following his intuition and a handful of photographs. He told how, for over a year, none of his colleagues at the newly-formed Anti-Paedophile Unit believed there was actually a crime to uncover. And he told how a mother in Hackney had complained about an elderly peeping tom staring from afar at her 6-year-old when the little girl did handstands. But when 2 policemen went to ask the OAP to desist, the old man was terrified and wet himself. Intrigued by the dozens of photos of little blonde girls around the flat, one of the policemen felt something was off and wondered what, or who, the old soldier was afraid of.

Thursday 7th November is publication day for this collection of jazz photography, in which seven Havana-based photographers shared the images they have capture over the years of the many Cuban and international jazz artists who have performed at Havana’s Jazz Plaza Festival. The book is coming out at the same time as London’s Jazz Festival, and an exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana of the work of these seven photographers.

It’s publication week for the new book from Jean Stubbs: Tobacco Counterpoints: Cuba and the Global Habano. An impressive retrospective collection of many of her extensive writings on the local and global history of Cuban tobacco – and in particular of that supreme luxury commodity, the Havana cigar.

Since 1980, once a year Havana comes alive with the sound of Jazz, with Jazz Plaza – Cuba’s premier international jazz festival. It is from out of Jazz Plaza that the seven photographers featured in this book, Jazz Habana (Abel Carmenate Abreu, Elio Minielo, Enrique ‘Kike’ Smith, Gonzalo Vidal, Jorge Villa, Maité Fernández & Xavier Carvajal) bring together their work, through which they make it possible for us to draw closer to the Jazz experience of successive festivals.

Before anyone jumps on the zoological inaccuracy of having what is clearly a jaguar on the cover of a book entitled The Tiger, allow me to clarify. In Venezuela, these elusive, spotted big cats are referred to as tigres. But the ‘tiger’ in Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s novel is really a metaphorical presence. Both demon-remnant of a savage grandmother clinging to the back of the protagonist, and the all too real burden of asthma in the tropics.

It was in was in the late 1960s when I first went to Cuba, drawn by the history of Cuban tobacco and tobacco workers as well as its young revolution. For years I delved deeper into how those working in tobacco agriculture and industry experienced change under colonialism, independence and revolution, influenced though never entirely convinced by the classic Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar by Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz.

There is an ancient Japanese art called kintsugi. In this, shards of broken pottery are carefully pieced back together, and their cracks filled with gold. In the process, what might otherwise have been drab, mundane, simply discarded and ignored, becomes a thing of beauty. Its very flaws the source of its value.