Theatre & Literature
The Barbican’s Death Note Knows Exactly How to Play God
Write a name, picture the face, and forty seconds later they are dead.
Theatre & Literature
Theatre and literature at The Cold Magazine. New writing for the stage and the page: playwrights and novelists in conversation, reviews, reading lists and the work we think deserves an audience.
Theatre & Literature
What if Bluebeard Passed the Bechdel Test? (And Other Ways We Retell Our Oldest Stories)
It’s 2026 and the world is obsessed with a 2,700-year-old story.
Theatre & Literature
Why Simon Wroe’s Ghost Month is the ultimate modern London novel
Every September, the spirits of the dead return before vanishing four weeks later in a puff of green ash.
Theatre & Literature
Inside the Trans Writing School Disrupting London Publishing
Across sixteen weeks between April and July, a group of trans writers have met in venues as diverse as the…
Theatre & Literature
Not Another Holocaust Novel: Rebecca Birrell on Art, Survival, and Venus, Vanishing
Rebecca Birrell walks into the café in canary yellow and chartreuse.
Theatre & Literature
Why Women Are Swapping Porn for Romantasy and Fairy Smut
Romantasy has exploded at precisely the moment the internet has made sexual curiosity feel complicated.
Theatre & Literature
Weird Books are Back: Cold’s Guide to the 2026 Booker Prize Longlist
“We’re due a return of weird literature”: 13 works chosen from 163 titles, and it seems the prophecy has come…
Theatre & Literature
Ann Scott’s Lesbian Cult Novel, ‘Superstars’, is Finally Available in English
Diaristic, hedonistic, full of sex, drugs and techno music: a group of queer women chasing fame, and love, on the…
Theatre & Literature
Was Leonardo da Vinci Queer? Inside the History That Inspired Phil Melanson’s ‘Florenzer’
In April 1476 a young artist was arrested by Florence’s vice squad, the scarily-named Office of the Night, on charges…
Theatre & Literature
Divorce Can Be a Gift: Avni Doshi on Her Novel ‘The First House’
The First House begins with a rupture: a woman’s husband walks into a room and announces that he wants a…
Theatre & Literature
Gay Hookup Culture on Stage: Conor O’Dwyer on ‘Homo(sapien)’
Edinburgh-based playwright Conor O’Dwyer is as proud of being gay as he is of being Irish.
Theatre & Literature
Books to read in a heatwave
From Paris to London, Europe is in the thick of a heat wave, with temperatures almost reaching 41C in the…
Theatre & Literature
In Said the Dead, Doireann Ní Ghríofa Unearths an Irish Victorian Mental Hospital
A book about a book, stamped “FEMALE CASE BOOK 22”: the case book of the first woman doctor to work…
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Theatre & Literature
“I’m glad that I didn’t grow up in a castle”: Nelio Biedermann on writing Lázár
Theatre & Literature
Rebecca Perry on Her Debut ‘May We Feed the King’
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