I remember one time when my daughter, aged 10, came home from school, shocked that some countries still have the death penalty. ‘You mean they actually execute people?’ She asked. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s the 21 st century!’ she said. ‘It’s cruel!’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘We might think it shouldn’t happen, but it does.’ I was reminded of that conversation recently while reading Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men , alongside listening to Danielle Fahiya’s excellent BBC podcast Mattan: Injustice of a Hanged Man . Both the novel and the podcast tell of the wrongful conviction and hanging of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali Muslim seaman living in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, in 1952. Mattan was accused of having brutally murdered a local shopkeeper, Lily Volpert (her name is changed in the book to Violet Volacki). Mattan maintained his innocence right to the end, but his appeals were unsuccessful, and he was hanged in Cardiff prison on 3 rd September 1952. His body was interred in the prison grou
It's been a while, Brown Brontë readers, I know. I've had so many other research and writing projects on the go that my blog has fallen by the wayside a little bit. I fully intend to try and post a bit more regularly now, but you've heard that before so I'm making no promises as to how often that will be. I will say that I've read and watched a bunch of stuff and I'd love to share reviews with you all, so watch this space. For now, I'll start with my thoughts on " I Am No Bird, " a dramatic and musical production by Stute Theatre , who are performing it as part of this year's Ilkley Literature Festival . It's a lively little piece that explores what it means - and meant - to be a woman trying to make a living from the arts. It looks at the barriers to women's creativity, historical and current, and, spoiler alert, there's a lot that hasn't changed, depressingly. The piece depicts three women trying to write and put on a show