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‘Twenty-five years after his death, His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Elect of God, Defender of the Faith,was finally being laid to rest, though they still could not be certain how he met his end.’
John Ryle attends the funeral of Haile Sellasie.
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‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
John Ryle is a British writer and anthropologist, working for aid agencies and human rights organizations in Africa and the Middle East. He is a former contributing editor to Granta.
More about the author →‘They show people denied access to markets that they enjoyed before the war, people impoverished by the fight to preserve their culture and to assert control of their territory.’
‘This is worth remembering: if it were not for Africa we would not be here at all.’
‘The beat of the city was shot through with drumming patterns used to invoke them in the Saturday night ceremonies.’
‘Bor is a long way from Khartoum – more than 700 miles. There were other hostile groups on the way and precious little food.’
‘Funny to end up here you may think, in this line of work, did I back into it, well more or less.’
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