Explore Essays and memoir
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Trouble at the Waterworks
Edward Blishen
‘Old age is a sustained process of injury. You are being very distinctly shot at.’
Thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul
Anthony Doerr
‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’
Kashmir
James Buchan
‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’
Undoing the folded lie: Poetry after 9/11
Rachael Allen
‘The real feeling of a day that changed everything forever is boiled down so incessantly, and so often, to cliché.’
Naomi Alderman | My Writing Playlist
Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman shares five songs she loves to write to.
Against Travel Writing
Robyn Davidson
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
Letter from Greece
Meaghan Delahunt
‘The only thing between Greece and total collapse is the Greek family.’
City of Dis: The Fiction of Don DeLillo
Norman Bryson
‘It has been his fate to be imminent for what is by now an unconscionably long time.’
A True Afrikaner
Mary Benson
‘What first struck me was his courtesy: it never faltered even when some remark by the prosecutor or an action by the police angered him, hardening the expression in his blue eyes.’
The Internment
John Conroy
‘In a low-rent corner of Belfast's city centre is a district known as Smithfield, and on its main street there is a market, an anarchist bookshop, a public toilet and a bookmaker's called Stanley’s.’
News Shark
Robert Drewe
‘By the time I was nineteen I was in a spin: hyperactive with selfconsciousness, excitement, sadness and suddenly assumed–and ill-fitting–maturity’.
Tiger’s Ghost
Jennie Erdal
‘For nearly fifteen years I wrote hundreds of letters that weren't from me. They ranged from perfunctory thank-you notes and expressions of condolence, to extensive correspondence with the great and the good: politicians, newspaper editors, bishops, members of the House of Lords.’
