The Translator I Never Wanted to Be
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In Conversation
Ellen Coon & Isabella Tree
‘The soil itself is filled with divine feminine energy. It’s alive, it’s pulsating.’
The Valley and the Stream
Danyl McLauchlan
‘Why does serotonin make you happy? How does it affect mood? What is mood? What is depression? How does any of this stuff work?’
Your Delicate Body
Caleb Azumah Nelson
‘And it wasn’t that day, or the day after, but sometime after that, you cried in your kitchen.’
In Conversation
Peter Ho Davies & Celeste Ng
‘Some of the wisest things friends have said to me have been over text! But it’s a different kind of thinking.’
Asylum Road
Olivia Sudjic
‘She’d blinked at me kindly and said it must be sad when your country no longer exists, then returned to pulverising her asparagus.’
Notes on Craft
Ho Sok Fong
‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’
Notes on Craft
Natascha Bruce
‘The reader doesn’t need to have answers, but they do need to have theories.’
Night as It Falls
Jakuta Alikavazovic
‘There wasn’t much money. His father had been blunt: the classes were fine, the rest wasn’t.’
Bleak Midwinter
Catherine Taylor
‘In a sense, we had been waiting for the Ripper to visit for months, even years.’
Laundry Bills and Manifestos
Francesca Wade
‘The great pleasure of archive work lies in searching for these secrets known and unknown.’
In Conversation
George Saunders & Natasha Randall
‘The way I write in general is basically just to move, in as a quiet-minded a manner as I can, toward what I feel as heat.’
Having and Being Had
Eula Biss
‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’
Disorientation
Ian Williams
‘The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting.’
Interview
Jay Bernard
An interview with the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.
Two Poems
sam sax
‘grief is an animal. we all know that. but which animal / exactly? what kingdom, what family, is it ever a fish?’
On Running
Larissa Pham
‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’
Best Book of 1891: The Birds of Manitoba
Sylvia Legris
‘During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.’
Best Book of 1978: Who Do You Think You Are?
Emily LaBarge
‘I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers’
Best Book of 1992: The English Patient
Stephanie Sy-Quia
‘I had been in England, a semi-foreign country, for a few months, and when I was asked where I was from, I had no easy answer.’
Best Book of 2019: Better Never Than Late
Ukamaka Olisakwe
‘This book is about how to navigate the thorny valley of dead dreams. Some will survive the ordeal; others will tip over the edge, irredeemable.’
Best Book of 1886: The Masterpiece
Summer Brennan
‘Zola’s characters are, in every sense of the term, art monsters.’
Best Book of 1959: Mrs Bridge
Sindya Bhanoo
‘When the book was published, my own parents were children in India, then a newly independent nation.’
Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger
Robert Chandler
Robert Chandler on why The Years of Anger by Randall Swingler is the best book of 1946.
Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821
Elvia Wilk
‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.
Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet
Daisy Lafarge
‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’
Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.
Best Book of 1924: The Beggar
Bill Manhire
‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’
Interview
Daisy Lafarge
‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.
