After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his career. However, the film did catch the eye of someone: Hollywood star Riz Ahmed.

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "watermelon" juices that soil still stirs, the book makes an urgent argument for recognising our uneasy intimacy with the nonhuman.

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking from positions of immense privilege – ranging from the well-meaning to outright grifters.

“Whoargh! Steady lads!” Under that headline, NME reported that Kevin Rowland had “announced his return to the music scene with a bizarre national poster campaign depicting him in make-up and women’s clothing whilst hitching up his skirt to show his pants.”

Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to the needs of the larger-than-life actor-manager Donald Wolfit. The Dresser, adapted by Harwood, went on to become a great film success starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney.

Katharina Volckmer’s début novel The Appointment follows one woman as she vents her frustrations, confusions and regrets to her doctor during a lengthy appointment in London. Ranging through ideas from sex to Nazism, religion to technology, this novel provides a panorama of modern life via the deeply personal journey of its narrator, and frames the highs and lows of human existence with vibrancy and humour. Volckmer offers a refreshing view on many themes that are traditionally approached with the utmost trepidation.

In 2018, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui burst onto the documentary scene with McQueen, a visually stunning study of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Acclaim and offers followed, but no-one could have predicted the subject of their second feature.

New Heavy Sounds is one of Britain’s most exciting and undersung labels. Founded in 2011, they have consistently released music that boasts innovation, imagination and a strong female presence. The added sweetener is that this comes attached to sheer guitar-slingin’ power of the kind heavy rockers, from the 1970s to the present, have always relished.

Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of unfortunate or fortuitous events, whether you are religious or not – it gives a shape for Jorge Consiglio’s novel Tres Monedas. A poet and an academic, Consiglio wrote this novel over the course of a ‘single scorching summer’ in his hometown of Buenos Aires. It is a book that moves toward a vista of overlapping concepts, saturated by the desire to transcend the rigidity of circumstance.

Horn player Sarah Willis joined the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001. She juggles her position with spells of teaching, interviewing soloists and conductors for the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall and hosting an online series of Horn Hangouts, interviews with musicians streamed live on her website and archived on YouTube.