Latest news with #Devotion
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Disco diva stuns fans with surprise appearance at huge Hydro gig
Fans at the Scissor Sisters' 20th anniversary concert were left stunned when iconic disco singer Jessie Ware made a surprise appearance on stage. The American pop-rock band played to a packed crowd at Glasgow's OVO Hydro on Saturday, May 17, 2025, marking two decades since the release of their debut album. The unexpected highlight of the night came when Jessie Ware joined the band mid-performance during their hit Take Your Mama, sending the audience into a frenzy. READ MORE: 'Wildly excited': Date revealed for award-winning musical's Glasgow premiere The Hydro shared a video of the jaw-dropping moment on social media, captioned: "The queen that is Jessie Ware just joined Scissor Sisters for a singsong and we will never get over it." Fans flooded the comments with excitement and disbelief. One wrote: "The way my friend and I absolutely lost it when she came out. Scotland never gets surprise guests, but she was the best surprise ever." Another added: "This was such an incredible moment! My jaw dropped!" A third simply said: "Screaming, crying, throwing up." READ MORE: Band behind Teenage Dirtbag to perform iconic debut album in full in Glasgow Jessie rose to fame with her 2012 debut album Devotion, which reached number five on the UK Albums Chart and featured the breakout single Wildest Moments. She has earned seven Brit Award nominations, including four for British Female Solo Artist, and both Devotion and That! Feels Good! were shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. The Scissor Sisters, formed in 2000, last released an album in 2012 before going on an indefinite hiatus. Their reunion show was already a cause for celebration, but Ware's appearance turned it into a truly unforgettable night.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hannah Kent: ‘I was kind of having a second adolescence'
The way Hannah Kent tells it, the wood-lined backstreets of the Adelaide Hills are as important to her writing as the hours spent at her desk. 'This is where I walk when I'm talking out my books,' she says as we set out from her gravel driveway. 'This is the closest thing to a daily jaunt – there's a few hills, it's a pretty sweaty affair.' It is usually Kent's wife, Heidi, who walks alongside her, patiently listening as the bestselling novelist 'mutters aloud' about the roadblocks and challenges blighting her latest work-in-progress. 'It's a great gift, you know, to have her put up with me for an hour while I simply talk out everything that's not happening.' Kent is a few days out from her 40th birthday when we meet, and in the middle of rewrites for a screenwriting project. She's excited about the milestone; she has had enough friends pass away too young to be insecure about ageing. The passage of time has also been front of mind thanks to her latest book, Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir whose knots were also teased out over these rolling hills. The book had its origins during the pandemic restrictions, when she and Heidi would trace this same loop with their young daughter and newborn son – two sleep-deprived parents pushing a giant pram. Kent was supposed to be finishing her third novel, Devotion, but the anxiety of lockdowns, border restrictions and motherhood were seeping into her subconscious. 'I was having these incredible dreams about Iceland, very intense, sensory-heavy, very realistic dreams,' she says. 'I started to have this acute feeling of homesickness for Iceland.' The frosty and remote Nordic nation has played a formative role in Kent's literary career and personal life since she first visited in 2003 as a bookish 17-year-old on a Rotary exchange. It was a big leap; the teenager spoke no Icelandic and arrived at a cold, dark Keflavík airport in the middle of winter. She was still there when the airport closed hours later – the welcoming party had forgotten about her. Eventually, Kent would make friends, learn the language and gain an adoptive second family who started calling her 'Hannah okkar' – 'our Hannah'. In 2020, while Kent was dreaming of Iceland, Kent's mother dropped off a giant cardboard box full of ephemera from her childhood – including journals, letters and folders of printed-out emails from those difficult first months in Iceland. 'I started thinking more and more about what I was experiencing at [this] point in my life. It was this kind of disconnection from self through becoming a parent, not really knowing how to write, and feeling physically alienated from myself because I didn't recognise my own body. 'And then I was reading these emails that my mum had dropped off, where I'm 17 years old and feeling kind of the same way – like feeling on the cusp of something. Feeling kind of frustrated, but also curious, and not really knowing who I am.' 'I was kind of having a second adolescence,' she realised; one that drew her unwaking mind back to Iceland. Kent had always dreamed of being a writer. This walking route isn't far from her childhood home, and when we pass a particularly beautiful paperbark tree, its outer layers peeling off in crisp white sheets, Kent explains how she used to make books out of bark as a kid. That dream took form in Iceland. It was on that first trip to Iceland that Kent encountered the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland. Her life and death – executed in 1830 for her part in the killing of two men – would later inspire Kent's debut novel, Burial Rites, in 2014. Its international success made Kent's name as a writer – while forever linking it with Iceland. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Chasing Magnúsdóttir's story taught Kent the craft of historical fiction – a careful mediation between slivers of revelation in the archive and a creative process that bordered on otherworldly (the final words she ascribes to Agnes came to Kent in a dream). 'It's intoxicating, it's such a heavy process,' Kent reflects. 'You have these moments of discovery which can completely shift your perspective. It's almost euphoric when you can discover something, or when your own speculations have proven to be correct, [because] there's so much doubt involved in any research process.' The story of her 2003 exchange was frequently retold when Kent was a debut novelist on the promotional trail, but she had taken care to keep some things for herself. She had always brushed off the idea of writing a memoir, but after finishing Devotion she was drawn back to those dreams. 'I've never really thought of my life as being interesting enough,' she says. 'That was why I write fiction – I'm drawn to other people's lives.' But after the challenges of her third novel, Kent realised the best way to reconcile this second adolescence was to make sense of the first. 'Spending all this time with my 17-year-old self, even just reading journals and diaries, there's a real anxiety there. Like, 'I've got to work out who I am, and what's authentic.' 'It's this idea of 'becoming', so that then you can get on with things. And then, of course, you keep getting older and the 'becoming' is endless. You're just always becoming, it's a constant state. 'All this yearning and questioning and curiosity converged at this particular point in time. And I thought, I'm getting that feeling I get when I know I've got to write about it to be rid of it.' She thought it would be easy, but her own past still required untangling. That box of her teenage writings was itself an imperfect archive, where the chipper accounts she emailed back to her parents didn't always align with her own memories, or the person she remembered being. 'I hadn't anticipated that at all. So as much as it's a reckoning with something that happened, it's [also] a reckoning with the person right now, and maybe the stories you have told about yourself. That was interesting.' Once border restrictions lifted, she eventually returned to Iceland in 2023 after being invited to open a literary festival. The homecoming allowed her to reflect on a place that had not only transformed her life and writing, but had also been subtly influenced in return. Today, the site of Magnúsdóttir's execution bears a new memorial that quotes from Burial Rites – and the words that came to Kent in a dream. Since she wrote Burial Rites, the public's understanding of the case has also evolved. In 2017 Iceland mounted a mock retrial using original transcripts that weren't available when she wrote the book. This time, Magnúsdóttir's life was spared in favour of a reduced 14-year prison sentence. Kent says she would probably write the book differently if embarking on it today, and wonders if she gave enough weight to the likelihood of sexual abuse in the story. Writing the memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, gave Kent a chance to reconsider Magnúsdóttir in print. But it also invites readers to commune with another figure from the past: that restless teenage girl who dreamed of being a writer and stepped off a plane into a cold and dark unknown. 'You know that almost physical feeling of just bursting with creativity?' Kent says. 'It was a real pleasure to be able to spend time with a younger Hannah who had that every day, you know? Because I do feel like you have to stay awake to it. 'I do think that you can lose that euphoria, you can lose that sense of wonder, and it's nice to still look at your contemporary creative practice, and be like, 'No, it's still there.' You know, I'm still being led by the same things.' After about an hour the loop has led us back to Kent's home – one of them at least. She waves goodbye at the driveway and heads back inside. After all, she has writing to do. Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent is out now through Picador
The Age
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘I could feel the cold': the dreams that told Hannah Kent what to write
In 2020, Hannah Kent began regularly dreaming of Iceland in a way that was so vivid she could feel the cold wind whipping off the wild northern sea. It wasn't the first time the author had experienced dreams that felt portentous, but with Australia in a COVID lockdown and a new baby also interrupting her sleep, she was left a little shaken. 'There was often a sense of something coming or something that I needed to pay attention to, like the dream was asking something of me,' she says. 'I could feel the cold and I could feel the landscape, and it was in this heightened detail.' She even spoke Icelandic in the dreams: 'It was so peculiar because, in my waking hours, I forget so much … but in my dreams I would be more fluent.' Kent has considered Iceland her second home since she spent a year there as a teenage exchange student in 2003. It provided the setting and idea for her bestselling debut novel Burial Rites, published 10 years later, and she revisits it in her new book, Always Home, Always Homesick. On a sunny autumn morning at a cafe in the leafy Adelaide Hills, near where she grew up and the home she now shares with wife Heidi and their two young children, she reflects that her lockdown dreams were symptomatic of a 'destabilising homesickness' for Iceland. 'Just knowing that I was stuck made me realise how much it meant to me, and even the possibility of Iceland was important to me… not necessarily being there, but just knowing that I could go.' Kent completed her third novel, Devotion, during the pandemic, but the spark had been ignited for Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir of her time living in Iceland that also illuminates pivotal points in her journey to becoming an author. She recounts how, aged about six and inspired by her love of books, she told her parents she wanted to be a writer. They were encouraging, but suggested that writers often had other jobs as well. Perhaps she could be a writer 'and something else'. In year 12, she was accepted for the local Rotary Club's student exchange program. Young Hannah put Iceland on her list of preferred countries for one reason: snow. 'I'd never seen it before,' she explains with a laugh. 'It always seemed to me such a magical thing. I think like a lot of kids born in the mid- to late '80s, we were fed a pretty steady diet of European literature, and there's a lot of snow.' She ended up in a tiny, remote Icelandic town called Saudarkrokur, which she describes in Always Home, Always Homesick as 'wild with mountains and sky and sea'. 'When I arrived it grew light at around 11 in this very blue, Nordic noir sort of way, and then it would be dark again by three,' she says. 'So you'd have about four hours of daylight, but you wouldn't see the sun because it was hidden behind the mountains … I liked the novelty of that, and I liked the novelty of the wind and the snow and the weather.' Kent has drawn on her talent for lyrical language and a box full of diaries, notebooks and correspondence to create evocative descriptions of Iceland. She immerses readers in the culture – where traditional foods range from fermented shark to boiled potatoes finished in caramel – and daily life with different host families and friends. As she fell in love with Iceland, she became inspired by the country's strong literary culture. 'I remember going visiting with people, and you're in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny little old farmhouse, and the place is just heaving with books – and people are reading them, too. 'I realised that it was possible to actually be quite serious about writing… without feeling like you had to cringe or apologise for having this kind of artistic ambition.' On a road trip during her exchange, Kent saw the site where a young woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, had been executed for murder alongside her co-accused in 1830. Iceland is full of stories and sagas, but Agnes got a hold on Hannah. Much later, while doing her honours in creative writing back in Adelaide, she decided to write a novel based on the condemned woman's life, beginning an exhaustive research process that included further trips to Iceland. The first draft of Burial Rites – a multi-award-winning book translated into more than 30 languages – was written while she was living in a share-house in Melbourne. Three years after Burial Rites came Kent's second historical novel, The Good People, which is inspired by Irish folklore. Devotion, published in 2021 and set between 19th-century Prussia and South Australia, ventures into magical realism to tell the story of the unbreakable bond between two women. TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO HANNAH KENT Worst habit? Biting my nails. Drinking too much coffee. Greatest fear? Something happening to my children. Environmental catastrophe. The line that stayed with you? 'There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.' From Wendell Berry's How to Be a Poet. Biggest regret? I don't have many, but I've occasionally worried about what others think. I regret wasting energy on that. Favourite book? Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The artwork/song you wish was yours? Can I choose an album? Tea for the Tillerman by Yusuf / Cat Stevens. If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I already time travel – I read. I go everywhere. Kent says it is only relatively recently that she realised how Iceland not only solidified her decision to be a writer, but also influenced the types of stories in which she is interested. 'I really love the way in which a lot of these slightly more mythical, disturbing, inexplicable stories in Iceland are presented to you as fact. It's just incorporated into the greater mysteries of life.' She has described Devotion as her love letter to Heidi, whom she met in Melbourne in 2016 after being encouraged by friends to try online dating. 'Heidi was the first person I agreed to meet up with, and then I just deleted the app,' she says of their instant connection. 'It really freaked me out. I was just like, 'Oh, it's you' – like I recognised her.' Heidi proposed on the day Australians voted 'Yes' to marriage equality, and Hannah's Icelandic host parents travelled to Australia for their wedding. The couple moved to Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills to raise their two children, Anouk, seven, and Rory, five. Loading Both kids share Kent's obsession with snow, and she hopes that when they are older, the family might spend some time living in Iceland. Anouk and Rory also love books. 'They've been read to every single night. We have a thing called family book, where we all pile into our bed and I will read to them because I do all the voices.' The film rights have been sold to all three of Kent's novels, and after writing the screenplay for the 2023 horror movie Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook, she is now working on the screen adaptations of The Good People and Devotion. She's also focused on her next book, which will be another novel. When I comment that she didn't end up needing a second career option – to be 'a writer and something else' – Kent laughs. 'I still think of 'ands'. For many years, I was going to be a pastry chef – I love cooking,' she says, adding that at various points she also considered teaching and medicine, and last year worked for a while in the bookshop just up the street from where we're sitting. 'I cast my net super-wide,' she says. 'I've always been slightly neurotic about how long I'm going to be able to write, so it's good to have back-up plans.'
Sydney Morning Herald
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘I could feel the cold': the dreams that told Hannah Kent what to write
In 2020, Hannah Kent began regularly dreaming of Iceland in a way that was so vivid she could feel the cold wind whipping off the wild northern sea. It wasn't the first time the author had experienced dreams that felt portentous, but with Australia in a COVID lockdown and a new baby also interrupting her sleep, she was left a little shaken. 'There was often a sense of something coming or something that I needed to pay attention to, like the dream was asking something of me,' she says. 'I could feel the cold and I could feel the landscape, and it was in this heightened detail.' She even spoke Icelandic in the dreams: 'It was so peculiar because, in my waking hours, I forget so much … but in my dreams I would be more fluent.' Kent has considered Iceland her second home since she spent a year there as a teenage exchange student in 2003. It provided the setting and idea for her bestselling debut novel Burial Rites, published 10 years later, and she revisits it in her new book, Always Home, Always Homesick. On a sunny autumn morning at a cafe in the leafy Adelaide Hills, near where she grew up and the home she now shares with wife Heidi and their two young children, she reflects that her lockdown dreams were symptomatic of a 'destabilising homesickness' for Iceland. 'Just knowing that I was stuck made me realise how much it meant to me, and even the possibility of Iceland was important to me… not necessarily being there, but just knowing that I could go.' Kent completed her third novel, Devotion, during the pandemic, but the spark had been ignited for Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir of her time living in Iceland that also illuminates pivotal points in her journey to becoming an author. She recounts how, aged about six and inspired by her love of books, she told her parents she wanted to be a writer. They were encouraging, but suggested that writers often had other jobs as well. Perhaps she could be a writer 'and something else'. In year 12, she was accepted for the local Rotary Club's student exchange program. Young Hannah put Iceland on her list of preferred countries for one reason: snow. 'I'd never seen it before,' she explains with a laugh. 'It always seemed to me such a magical thing. I think like a lot of kids born in the mid- to late '80s, we were fed a pretty steady diet of European literature, and there's a lot of snow.' She ended up in a tiny, remote Icelandic town called Saudarkrokur, which she describes in Always Home, Always Homesick as 'wild with mountains and sky and sea'. 'When I arrived it grew light at around 11 in this very blue, Nordic noir sort of way, and then it would be dark again by three,' she says. 'So you'd have about four hours of daylight, but you wouldn't see the sun because it was hidden behind the mountains … I liked the novelty of that, and I liked the novelty of the wind and the snow and the weather.' Kent has drawn on her talent for lyrical language and a box full of diaries, notebooks and correspondence to create evocative descriptions of Iceland. She immerses readers in the culture – where traditional foods range from fermented shark to boiled potatoes finished in caramel – and daily life with different host families and friends. As she fell in love with Iceland, she became inspired by the country's strong literary culture. 'I remember going visiting with people, and you're in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny little old farmhouse, and the place is just heaving with books – and people are reading them, too. 'I realised that it was possible to actually be quite serious about writing… without feeling like you had to cringe or apologise for having this kind of artistic ambition.' On a road trip during her exchange, Kent saw the site where a young woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, had been executed for murder alongside her co-accused in 1830. Iceland is full of stories and sagas, but Agnes got a hold on Hannah. Much later, while doing her honours in creative writing back in Adelaide, she decided to write a novel based on the condemned woman's life, beginning an exhaustive research process that included further trips to Iceland. The first draft of Burial Rites – a multi-award-winning book translated into more than 30 languages – was written while she was living in a share-house in Melbourne. Three years after Burial Rites came Kent's second historical novel, The Good People, which is inspired by Irish folklore. Devotion, published in 2021 and set between 19th-century Prussia and South Australia, ventures into magical realism to tell the story of the unbreakable bond between two women. TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO HANNAH KENT Worst habit? Biting my nails. Drinking too much coffee. Greatest fear? Something happening to my children. Environmental catastrophe. The line that stayed with you? 'There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.' From Wendell Berry's How to Be a Poet. Biggest regret? I don't have many, but I've occasionally worried about what others think. I regret wasting energy on that. Favourite book? Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The artwork/song you wish was yours? Can I choose an album? Tea for the Tillerman by Yusuf / Cat Stevens. If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I already time travel – I read. I go everywhere. Kent says it is only relatively recently that she realised how Iceland not only solidified her decision to be a writer, but also influenced the types of stories in which she is interested. 'I really love the way in which a lot of these slightly more mythical, disturbing, inexplicable stories in Iceland are presented to you as fact. It's just incorporated into the greater mysteries of life.' She has described Devotion as her love letter to Heidi, whom she met in Melbourne in 2016 after being encouraged by friends to try online dating. 'Heidi was the first person I agreed to meet up with, and then I just deleted the app,' she says of their instant connection. 'It really freaked me out. I was just like, 'Oh, it's you' – like I recognised her.' Heidi proposed on the day Australians voted 'Yes' to marriage equality, and Hannah's Icelandic host parents travelled to Australia for their wedding. The couple moved to Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills to raise their two children, Anouk, seven, and Rory, five. Loading Both kids share Kent's obsession with snow, and she hopes that when they are older, the family might spend some time living in Iceland. Anouk and Rory also love books. 'They've been read to every single night. We have a thing called family book, where we all pile into our bed and I will read to them because I do all the voices.' The film rights have been sold to all three of Kent's novels, and after writing the screenplay for the 2023 horror movie Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook, she is now working on the screen adaptations of The Good People and Devotion. She's also focused on her next book, which will be another novel. When I comment that she didn't end up needing a second career option – to be 'a writer and something else' – Kent laughs. 'I still think of 'ands'. For many years, I was going to be a pastry chef – I love cooking,' she says, adding that at various points she also considered teaching and medicine, and last year worked for a while in the bookshop just up the street from where we're sitting. 'I cast my net super-wide,' she says. 'I've always been slightly neurotic about how long I'm going to be able to write, so it's good to have back-up plans.'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jonathan Majors and Meagan Good Are Married, Source Says
Jonathan Majors and Meagan Good have tied the knot, a source tells PEOPLE on Tuesday, March 18. The couple confirmed their engagement to PEOPLE at the EBONY Power 100 Gala in November 2024, where the Think Like a Man actress showed off her diamond engagement ring while posing on the red carpet. The news of their wedding was first reported by Entertainment Tonight. "We're feeling great,' Good told PEOPLE of the engagement in November. Majors added: 'It's a season of joy." Related: Jonathan Majors and Meagan Good's Relationship Timeline 'It's a season of all the good things,' Good continued, with Majors adding, 'Amen.' The pair also told E! News that they chose to share their news at the gala because it's where they met two years ago "in the unisex bathroom." Good previously told PEOPLE in July 2024 that she and Majors had 'instant chemistry' when they met. The pair were first linked in May 2023 after they were spotted watching a movie together at an the Alamo Drafthouse in Los Angeles. Around the same time, the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania star headed to trial on misdemeanor assault and harassment charges. (Majors has maintained his innocence.) Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human-interest stories. A source told PEOPLE at the time that the Harlem actress grew closer to Majors amid his assault charges and their friendship turned romantic during that time. She was then photographed accompanying the Devotion actor at several of his court appearances. During an interview with PEOPLE, Good opened up about the early days of her relationship with Majors amid his legal battle, admitting that he "actually tried to encourage me not to be with him." Related: Meagan Good Says Jonathan Majors Tried to 'Encourage Me Not to Be with Him' amid His Legal Battle (Exclusive) "He wanted to protect me," she explained. "I was like, 'My love, first of all, you're dealing with a Black Leo.' And also, I grew up in this industry. The things that I've been through gave me the bandwidth to love other people, regardless." The trial ended in December 2023 when Majors was found guilty of two counts of misdemeanor assault and harassment. In April, he was sentenced to complete one year of an "in person batterers" intervention program in Los Angeles. Good was previously married to pastor DeVon Franklin, whom she finalized her divorce from in June 2022. Read the original article on People
