Franklin Nelson’s cultural highlights

Franklin Nelson works at the Financial Times, commissioning and writing on UK politics, the economy and society as well as books and the arts. His reviews, features and essays have also been published by the TLS, the London Review of Books and Wasafiri. 

Book: Annie Ernaux, The Years

I first read Annie Ernaux during the year when, thanks to the Erasmus programme, I enrolled at Toulouse University as part of my degree course. By then, Ernaux was well known in France, and a staple of French literature courses, but less so beyond. That changed when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. The Years, published in France as Les Années in 2008 (Éditions Gallimard) and in English in 2018 (Fitzcarraldo Editions), marks a continuation of the autobiographical impetus that has shaped her writing, blending private story with public memory in a compelling account of France – and a woman’s life – in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Re-reading the book this summer, as France was wrestling with its political future, reminded me of the richness of Ernaux’s insights, which belie the plainness of her prose.

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-years/

Podcast: Media Confidential

As a journalist, I spend my time thinking and writing about events and big decisions in Britain and around the world, and the other people who have played a role in them or taken them. But developments and controversies in media can influence what journalists cover and how. Hosted by Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber, former editors of The Guardian and the Financial Times, Media Confidential broaches the big and small themes that affect how newsrooms operate. So far, the podcast has tackled a range of subjects; a personal highlight was the episode on what the influx of Britons into senior roles in American media says about journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. 

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/media-confidential

Art: Claudette Johnson: Darker than Blue 

‘Art makes life worth living […] it’s one of the last free places on earth you can go to. Where there is nothing to restrict or bind you. Where you can be free.’ Claudette Johnson’s conception of art is one that I share wholeheartedly. On election day this year, after Sir Keir Starmer memorably told an interviewer that he did not have a favourite novel or poem, I travelled to Birmingham to see this exhibition. It was smaller than I thought it would be, but the work on show was beautiful. I love Johnson’s use of colour and the life that she gifts her subjects, and how they often refuse to stay within the frames they have been given. There’s a message in that for all of us.  

https://barber.org.uk/claudette-johnson/

Photography: Ernest Cole: House of Bondage 

I was introduced to The Photographers’ Gallery in London by a family friend probably about 10 years ago. Tucked around the back of Oxford Street, it’s a bit like a Tardis. House of Bondage, Ernest Cole’s reflections on surviving apartheid South Africa (June – September 2024), made for striking viewing. His lens does capture joy and hardship, but above all it bears witness to the quotidian grind of his birth country’s ethnic majority in the second-half of the twentieth century. ‘House of Bondage’ is a descriptor Cole gave to his South Africa, whose authorities barred him from ever returning in 1968 after he fled to the US. A second exhibition, Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile – his observations of New York City, was showing at the Autograph Gallery, across town, from June until October 2024. 

https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/ernest-cole-house-bondage

https://autograph.org.uk/exhibitions

Music: No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin by Meshell Ndegeocello

This year’s excellent series of SpeakySpokey:WritersMosaic Live Events began in January 2024 at The British Library in London with Colin Grant, Mendez, Chitra Ramaswamy and Vanessa Kisuule discussing James Baldwin. Whatever kind of writer you consider yourself to be, Baldwin speaks to you, and many words have been written on his centenary. Some of my favourite are those sung, spoken and arranged by Meshell Ndegeocello and her collaborators on No More Water. Its soulful tracks skilfully blend genres, and its lyrics echo Baldwin’s prose not just in its themes but its texture. Anger and beauty and truth: a fitting tribute. 

https://store.bluenote.com/products/meshell-ndegeocello-no-more-water-the-gospel-of-james-baldwin

https://writersmosaic.org.uk/events/speaky-spokey/james-baldwin/

WritersMosaic writer: This year, a friend I made while studying in Toulouse sent me a photo of a poetry book she had bought and immediately loved: it was an Italian translation of Roger Robinson’s Portable Paradise. In reply, I sent her a link to Robinson’s WritersMosaic profile. What he says about ‘constantly placing yourself outside the box’, it occurs to me now, chimes with Claudette Johnson’s approach to painting.

Franklin Nelson

Franklin Nelson works for the Financial Times, commissioning and writing on UK politics, the economy and society as well as books and the arts.