Now that I’m no longer living in India, whenever there’s a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.
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‘If you like people who hate each other, it’s paradise.’
Now that I’m no longer living in India, whenever there’s a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Nicholas Shakespeare was one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. He has written for Granta on Abimael Guzman, Martha Gellhorn and Tasmania, the background to his most recent novel, Secrets of the Sea. He is also the author of a biography Bruce Chatwin, and is currently preparing an edition of Chatwin's letters.
More about the author →‘What clipped the wings of her fiction and grounded her imagination was precisely what made her soar as a journalist.’
‘By coming to Tasmania, I'd repeated the pattern of an ancient, unknown relative and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way.’
‘At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras.‘
‘They called him Presidente Gonzalo, but his name was Abimael Guzmán. I had come to Lima to find Guzmán, although I knew I wouldn't succeed.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘Despair sat on her shoulders where her wings should have been. Darkness consumed her, the quivering lip of a dying abalone, grease in the barrel of a gun.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Pacific.
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