Explore Essays and memoir
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Dutch Harbor Nights
Jim Ruland
‘When one of the fishermen starts belting out ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Out Tonight’, it feels like a prophecy come to life.’
In Cyberspace: a love letter
Joanna Walsh
‘I’m at a cafe table. It doesn’t matter which country. I’ve been travelling for a long time. By train. Nine, ten different countries in thirty days, a couple of nights in each, maybe three at most.’
War Letters
António Lobo Antunes
‘I’m doing my best to survive all this, but sometimes I feel so homesick that words simply empty of meaning.’
How to be Gay and Indian
Manil Suri
‘This was supposed to be my great in-your-face coming-out campaign, which I’d fretted over for months beforehand. Had India suddenly lost its conservativeness, turned enlightened, even hip?’
Inner City
Lauren Beukes
‘It has taken this to make me realize that de-humanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted too.’
Remembering Iain M Banks
Stuart Kelly
Stuart Kelly remembers Iain Banks, and assesses the influence he's had on this generation of writers.
I Love This Dirty Town
Anjum Hasan
‘What is hard to miss and impossible not to grieve over is how present-day Shillong has been overwhelmed by the material aspirations of its people.’
Naomi Alderman | My Writing Playlist
Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman shares five songs she loves to write to.
Jenni Fagan | My Writing Playlist
Jenni Fagan
Best of Young British Novelist Jenni Fagan selects five songs that she loves to write to.
Helen Oyeyemi | My Writing Playlist
Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi on what she listens to while writing and editing.
Playing the Odds
David Szalay
‘What, I wonder now, must the texture of my life have been like then, that winning those sort of sums failed to leave even the slightest mark on my memory?’
Rooms That Have Had Their Part
Joanna Kavenna
‘Rooms jaundiced by bad lighting, so you wondered, what is ague, and could we have it? Rooms that hummed, a hum you couldn’t quite identify, or that seemed in the end to come from your own head.’
