Hiromi Kawakami

‘Rather than death itself, it is the disappearance of traces that seems unbearable and sad. The disappearance of all signs that I existed.’

Issue 93

Jackie Kay

‘I realize with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin’

Sema Kaygusuz

Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.

Stuart Kelly

Stuart Kelly remembers Iain Banks, and assesses the influence he's had on this generation of writers.

Stuart Kelly

'Literature and literary criticism took me away from the Church as a teenager, and literature and literary criticism brought me back to it later.'

Issue 83

Thomas Keneally

‘So the Ross Sea Novotel and McMurdo Sheraton could be built within this century. Children will gambol on the ice shelf where Scott exhaled his last, pained breath.’

Issue 70

Thomas Keneally

Issue 86

Thomas Keneally

‘In Los Angeles in late October of 1980, I was feeling the strange, malign electricity the Santa Ana winds bring to the city.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘But London has always been impossible and yet possible and has always called me.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘Faith: the greater it is, the more unsupported it must be’

A.L. Kennedy

‘I was tempted to let the pages blow overboard and start again...But they have very stern laws about littering at sea.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘And this was my grandmother, this man-destroying tyrant, this magnificent perfectionist with untireable arms and unfathomable ways of seeing.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘After dinner and schoolwork and dog-walking and the rest, even if I’d put the light out and laid myself down for definite rest, little ideas and scraps and nonsenses would tickle in and start to shake me. They would make the nights too bright to resist.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘I am looking for my dead grandfather in the British Library.’