British working class and ethnic accents still face the same negative bias they did 50 years ago. mentatdgt/ Shutterstock Devyani Sharma, Queen Mary University of London Do you judge people’s abilities based on their accent? Do you think a person with a posh accent must be more intelligent or better informed than someone with a multicultural London accent or a …

shutterstock Amy Wigelsworth, Sheffield Hallam University An emerging genre of fiction in France is providing an unlikely brand of escapism. Growing numbers of French writers are choosing work as their subject matter – and it seems that readers can’t get enough of their novels. The prix du roman d’entreprise et du travail, the French prize for the best business or …

Lukasz Pajor/Shuttertsock Heather Green, Nottingham Trent University The Derbyshire countryside, in England’s East Midlands, is a region that has inspired writers – both classic and contemporary. The juxtaposition of rolling hills, stark moorland and craggy summits play backdrop to numerous novels in a variety of genres. The area is easily reached from a number of large cities – but parts …

Marco Cappelletti/OMA/Islamic Arts Biennale Sumayya Vally, UCL The inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (Biennales are large and prestigious international art exhibitions held every two years.) This important new event for the Muslim world features numerous African artists. And the biennale’s artistic director is Sumayya Vally, a South African architecture professor and principal of Counterspace design …

Florian Stadtler, University of Bristol Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller. The story unfolds as a fictional retelling of Bisnaga’s history, premised on the archaeological discovery of the Jayaparajaya, …

John Frederick Wilson, York St John University Grief is a universal emotion. It’s something we all feel, no matter where we come from or what we’ve been through. Grief comes for us all and as humans who form close relationships with other people, it’s hard to avoid. Studies of grieving brains – be it scans of the brain regions which …

Sennacherib – his face deliberately damaged in antiquity – presides over captives from the Levantine city of Lachish. British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA Martin Worthington, Trinity College Dublin Archaeologists in northern Iraq, working on the Mashki and Adad gate sites in Mosul that were destroyed by Islamic State in 2016, recently uncovered 2,700-year-old Assyrian reliefs. Featuring war scenes and trees, these …

The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Ashy Cat Inc, CC BY-NC-SA Claire Gilmour, University of Bristol With the Arab spring of 2011, a downturn in tourism and the devastation of COVID, the odds have been stacked against the opening of Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, work on which began in 2005 and is due to complete 2023. Nevertheless, it will house …

Flickr/The Booker Prizes Naomi Adam, University of Liverpool They say that everyone has a book in them. But how about a Booker prize? That’s probably what the six shortlisted authors of the Booker prize 2022 will be wondering as they count down the days to the live-streamed awards ceremony. On Monday 17 October, amid the opulent surrounds of a packed …

One of thousands of young boys forced to work Ghana’s fishing industry, often given to fishermen by their impoverished families. Tugela Ridley/ EPA Stephen Collins, University of the West of Scotland An estimated 40.3 million people around the world are trapped in slavery. One in four victims are children, with women and girls affected most. Modern slavery occurs when people …