Suzie Miller’s award-winning monologue hits the road next year, with the Killing Eve actor playing a barrister who defends men of rape and is assaulted herself

Jodie Comer is to reprise her Olivier and Tony award-winning performance in Prima Facie “one last time” on tour next year, including a visit to her hometown of Liverpool.

The monologue, written by Suzie Miller, stars Comer as a barrister who defends men of rape and is assaulted herself. The Killing Eve actor made her West End debut in 2022 in the show, which sold out and then broke box-office records when it played in cinemas for NT Live. Comer took it to Broadway in 2023 and also recorded an audiobook adaptation by Miller, who spent 15 years as a lawyer.

There has been outrage over Transport for London’s decision to remove those mini station libraries, but let’s not rush to call it ‘health and safety gone mad’

In my nearest tube station, there used to be a book-swap in the entrance, which I used to love for the sheer speed of uptake. You could drop any old random nonsense there in the morning and, by the time you came home in the evening, it would be gone. Once, I left an anthology of short plays from 1976. It wasn’t a particularly special year for plays, and not one of them was by anyone you’d have heard of – but by the time I got on the tube, someone in my carriage was reading it.

As satisfying as that was, I could hardly call it a huge part of my life. So when the little exchange libraries vanished overnight, I was nothing like as outraged as a lot of people I know, who blamed, variously: health and safety gone mad; Sadiq Khan (and, fair play, I guess he is the only person you could name from Transport for London, but it feels unlikely that his was the deciding vote); philistinism; modernity. What on earth could have prompted this barbaric act?

Moments of lyricism and literary flourishes help to leaven the grimness as the backstory of Haymitch Abernathy, eventual mentor to Katniss Everdeen, takes centre stage

From the publication of the first volume in 2008, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series was an enormous hit, later adapted as hugely successful films. Inevitably, a prequel was spawned, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020), now followed by Sunrise on the Reaping, set about a quarter of a century before the events of the original trilogy.

The books’ success partly lay in Collins’s skilful refashioning of an ancient story, the myth of the Minotaur, which she placed in a futuristic world, giving agency to the weak to overthrow the powerful. But it also came from her close attention to the effects of social media and reality television, as she examined the line between the authentic self and pretence, and how narratives can be manipulated for advantage. In this new book Collins returns to these familar themes with the story of the likable Haymitch Abernathy. Readers have met him already, as a mentor to the original trilogy’s beloved heroine, Katniss Everdeen.

As the 30-year-old studio behind many innovative and beloved video games shuts down, its founders, fans and designers discuss what made it so special

Late last month, Warner Bros announced it was closing three of its game development studios in a “strategic change of direction”: WB Games San Diego, Player First Studios, and Monolith Productions. At a time when the games industry is racked with layoffs and studio closures, the barrage of dispiriting headlines can be numbing. But the shutdown of Monolith cut through the noise, sparking fresh shock and outrage at the industry’s slash and burn approach to cost cutting. There are numerous reasons for this, but among them was a pervading belief that Monolith would be around forever. “I don’t think I ever really considered the possibility that it would shut down one day,” says Garrett Price, one of Monolith’s seven founding members.

True to its name, Monolith was a singular presence. Founded in 1994, it was a prolific developer whose games displayed visual flair, mechanical inventiveness and a knack for synthesising pop-cultural themes. Most excitingly, you could never really predict what the studio would do next. While it primarily produced first-person shooters, there were forays into platformers, dungeon crawlers and open-world games. And even the core FPS titles differed wildly in theme and style, inspired by everything from 60s spy films to Japanese horror.

Re-creating the founding of the Impressionist movement, when artists including Monet, Renoir and Cézanne showed their work at their own exhibition

It’s back to the tried and trusted blockbuster names of French impressionism for the latest release from Exhibition on Screen, the Brighton-based outfit demonstrating remarkable staying power in the gallery-film sector; their consistent level of excellence means they remain largely unchallenged in the field. Excursions into the comparatively offbeat – Japanese contemporary art, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud – are balanced by home bankers, of which this account of the original impressionist exhibition in 1874, must be counted.

The film takes its cue from a show jointly mounted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (where it was called Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment ) and Paris’s Musée d’Orsay ( Paris 1874: Inventing impressionism ). Both exhibitions, and the film, re-create the founding moment of the style, when 30 (or possibly 31) artists – who had been turned down by the official Paris Salon – showed their work in a studio operated by the celebrated photographer Nadar, under the moniker “Société Anonyme”; the Salon des Refusés, the repository for rejects from the Salon founded by Napoleon III, had in fact been established over a decade earlier.

Conflicted – the tensions and contradictions that define the personal and the global – is the theme at Format , the revered Derby bienniale of contemporary photography

Featuring interviews and archive footage of the brilliant civil rights activist, the readings of her poems will have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up

Nikki Giovanni, bestselling American poet and civil rights activist, blazed on to the scene in the 1960s . In this documentary, completed before she died in December , we watch Giovanni in her late 70s, reigning over sold-out public appearances. On stage she recites poems about love, race and gender and in between, with the timing of a standup comedian, she has the auditorium erupting in whoops and laughter. Posing for selfies, a woman tells Giovanni she named her daughter after her; another says she wrote to her on the verge of dropping out of college. “You wrote back. I’m a teacher now!”

In archive footage, Giovanni as a young woman, reads her 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa, which has a line about how white people fail to understand the lives of black people: “they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy”. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, during segregation and, after witnessing domestic violence at home, she went to live with her grandparents. Speaking in a radio interview she is blunt: “Either I was going to kill him” – she’s talking about her father – “or I was going to move.”

The Nobel laureate’s wonderful new novel connects a trio of east African teens as they come of age, moving from small-scale dramas to wide-ranging social panoramas

The receipt of a big award inevitably ramps up the pressure on whatever the winner publishes next, but there can be no such fears over Abdulrazak Gurnah ’s new novel, Theft , his first since becoming a Nobel laureate in 2021 . Set between his birthplace, Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it’s a quietly powerful demonstration of storytelling mastery, at once coming-of-age chamber piece and wide-angled postcolonial panorama, pegged to the inner lives of its central trio – all teenagers followed into adulthood. Meanwhile, sketched between the lines, is family heartache spread over several generations, all narrated in a quicksilver style that gives you the pleasurable sense that you’re putty in the hands of a warm yet clear-eyed authorial intelligence.

It begins by tracing the marital misery that led to one of its characters, Karim, growing up under the eye of a stepbrother who nurtures his ambition to go to university. His story is twined with the unexplained arrival of a younger boy, Badar, an orphan seemingly taken into servitude in Karim’s well-off household; a murky arrangement considered payback for an ancestral wrong alluded to in the book’s title, and a state of affairs that unsurprisingly lights a slow-burn fuse of envy, suspicion and resentment.

Crisis within British television is leading to an exodus of production talent, media executive says

The UK’s television industry is being hit by a “perfect storm” that risks leading to British stories disappearing from the small screen, Elisabeth Murdoch has said.

Murdoch, co-founder of the production company Sister, said that a crisis within British television was leading to an exodus of production talent – as well as a danger that British stories were struggling to be told. It follows warnings that cash-strapped British broadcasters are targeting their resources at dramas with international appeal.