Hello and welcome to Culture Café!
How do we live? That’s a nice, big, juicy question – and the one we’ll be exploring here. How do we make sense of our big, bad, beautiful world?
This is culture: the texture of our daily lives, the ideas and politics that shape them, the art and books that light them up. It’s the coffee and cake and geopolitics. It’s Putin’s gameplan, Baby Reindeer and the new Sally Rooney.
Yes, the world can be extremely grim, but it’s endlessly fascinating and often beautiful.
Think of a café in Vienna or Paris, or a bar in Florence or Rome. Think of animated conversation over tiny cups of coffee or negronis served with truffle crisps.
If you’re a cultural omnivore, then please join me. Help yourself to something delicious. Let’s raise a glass.
About me
I’m a journalist, broadcaster and author of two memoirs. The first, The Art of Not Falling Apart, was picked as a Book of the Year in the New Statesman and The Mail on Sunday, which hailed it as “a manual on how to survive in the 21st-century”. The second, Outside, the Sky is Blue, was picked by The Times and The Sunday Times as a 2022 Best Summer Read.
I’ve worked at Faber and Faber. I’ve worked on the literature programme at the Southbank Centre. I’ve been Director of The Poetry Society and was the first woman to run it since Muriel Spark in 1948. I’ve written for most of the UK’s leading publications and reviewed fiction and non-fiction for The Observer, The New Statesman, the TLS, The Mail and The Sunday Times. You can find out more about my writing here.
For ten years, I was at The Independent, largely as a full-time writer, columnist and interviewer focusing on books, arts, politics and current affairs. I left The Independent in 2013. (My dramatic departure is the opening of The Art of Not Falling Apart.) I was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the UK’s leading political journalism prize, just after I was fired.
Since then, I’ve written for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Mail. I’m on Sky News twice a month talking mostly about politics. I’ve been on boards in the NGO, arts and housing sectors. I’ve hosted a podcast, The Art of Work, about how we find fulfilment as we pay the bills. Writing is how I find most of mine.
What readers say about my work
“A clear and important voice in British journalism.” - Carol Ann Duffy, former UK poet laureate
“A kind of war reporter’s dispatches from the barricades of modern life.” – Robert Harris, bestselling author
“Patterson is a passionate, funny woman who refuses to simply struggle on. She believes in living.” - The Sunday Times
“I am in awe of the honesty and bravery.” – Bernardine Evaristo, Booker prize-winner
“Patterson invests her case histories with such intelligent passion and cracking candour that you feel as if you are listening to your cleverest, funniest and, above all, kindest friend.” - Kathryn Hughes, The Mail on Sunday
“Moving and ultimately uplifting and beautifully written.” - David Nicholls, author of One Day
“I read this beautiful and exceptional book in one sitting.” – Kate Mosse, bestselling author
“Brilliant, poignant and also very funny” – The Bookseller
