Darcey Steinke

‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’

Paulo Scott

‘He not only sees the World Cup as a ceasefire, but also as a series of sleights of hand that hide what’s really going on, political debauchery, spin and chicanery.’

Mona Simpson

‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’

Issue 126

Jonny Steinberg

‘Peter Mitchell died on a frontier, not so much between black and white, or between the landed and the landless, as between the past and the future.’

Sigrid Rausing

Issue 129

Isabella Tree

‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’

Anjan Sundaram

Dense forest and formless roads lead Anjan Sundaram to the sites of conflict in the Central African Republic in 2014.

Issue 129

Will Self

Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.

Andre Perry

‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.

Issue 128

Jess Row

‘I walk out of the theatre in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.’

Issue 126

Norman Rush

‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’

David Treuer

‘When he stepped into the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful.’

Jim Ruland

‘It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan.’

Issue 127

Rebecca Solnit

‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’