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A few things I’ve enjoyed in 2024.

Play of the year

Robert Icke’s retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus, at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, was spellbinding from first moment to last. You know what’s going to happen yet it pulses with the tense energy of a political thriller. Hitting the same heights as Icke’s masterful Oresteia from 2015, the considered and dynamic production is brought home by captivating performances from Mark Strong and Lesley Manville.

Album of the year

The long-anticipated return of The Cure with Songs of a Lost World made me feel both old and young. Young as it hurled me back 35 years to playing Disintegration on the day of release, Robert Smith’s intonation unchanged, the layered guitars and synths bridging the years. And old because this is a dispatch from the edge of the abyss, a meditation on death and dying to sit with Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.

Books of the year

With Come and Get It Kiley Reid built on the promise of her debut Such a Fun Age, delivering a freewheeling campus novel that skewers the power dynamics of money, race and class. David Peace’s Munichs also lived up to expectations, meticulously recreating the days following the 1958 Munich air disaster. Of the older novels I read in 2024, the standout was Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, driving her Regeneration trilogy to its heart-shattering conclusion.

Song of the year

I loved ‘The Feminine Urge’ by The Last Dinner Party, from their excellent debut album Prelude to Ecstasy. A heart-pounding chorus that turns out to have been only a pre-chorus for an even more ridculously catchy skyscraping refrain. Music that takes you out of yourself, creating a moment out of time.

Here’s to more such moments in 2025.

I’m thrilled to be working with the Jericho Prize, a new competition for unpublished Black-British children’s writers.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Jericho Prize is looking for writers with great stories to inspire children aged 4 years plus and 7–9.

Winners in each category receive a £500 cash prize, exclusive access to publishing industry professionals and much more. The prize is supported by leading children’s publishers Knights Of, Penguin Random House Children’s and Alanna Max, plus the Youth Libraries Group, Storymix and Candid Cocoa.

The project will also be making free resources for new writers available online during the course of the prize, with experienced writers giving advice on every stage of the writing process, from coming up with ideas to working with agents and publishers.

I’ll be helping with the marketing of the prize, as we try to spread the word and unearth all the fantastic writing talent out there. Give us a follow on Twitter or Instagram.

You can find out more at www.jerichoprize.com. The prize is free to enter for unpublished and self-published Black-British writers over the age of 18, with submissions open from 2 August 2021.