Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor & Bernd Hartung

‘If the river makes a sound now, it is a drawn-out moan.’ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor on distilleries in Kenya, with photographs by Bernd Hartung.

Merritt Tierce

‘Once you learn to seal the shell, to make it watertight, you can let anything roil around in there.’

Issue 41

Gabriel García Márquez

‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘ Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.

Issue 69

Diana Athill

‘I thought so highly of Vidia’s writing and felt his presence on our list to be so important that I simply could not allow myself not to like him.’

Bill Buford

Bill Buford on his decision to resign as editor of this magazine, which he relaunched in its present form in 1979.

Davide Enia

Beth Gardiner

‘After all my travels, I can see now what I couldn’t when I started. In the suffering pollution brings, there is also the glimmer of a different future, its outlines visible through the haze.’

Issue 149

Elif Shafak

‘The first time I heard the word exile – sürgün – in Turkish, I was a child. It struck me how closely it rhymed with another word: hüzün – melancholy.’

Fabián Martínez Siccardi

‘I was harbouring a southern feeling, a deep connection with the South of this real world, where I was born and will probably die.’

James Pogue

‘In 2018 in northern California, 21,000 homes burned.’

Zoe Tennant

‘Indigenous chefs will tell you that their dishes are Indigenous, not Canadian. With the plate, these chefs demonstrate that the food is the land, and that the land is still theirs.’ Zoe Tennant on Indigenous cuisines.

Jennifer Kabat

Jennifer Kabat on the Anti-Rent War, one of the earliest moments of rural populism in the US, and something few know about outside the Catskill Mountains.

Issue 27

John Gregory Dunne

‘I prefer not to speculate about what might have happened if I had not taken the ECG.’