Explore Essays and memoir
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Person of the Year
Roy Robins
‘This conflation of hard-nosed realism and bright-eyed idealism has confused the aims of the award.’
The Last Vet
Aminatta Forna
‘Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.’
The Fig Tree and the Wasp
Brian Chikwava
‘The day I first saw the dance was the day we had expected to end with the execution of my maternal grandfather.’
Naomi Alderman | My Writing Playlist
Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman shares five songs she loves to write to.
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
Mrs Thatcher’s Religious Pilgrimage
Jeremy Seabrook & Trevor Blackwell
‘Mrs Thatcher's success is not only in her ability to plunder the chapel culture in which she was born - that fertile source of imagery and suasion - for she is also a story-teller to the nation, offering us easy and instant illustrations like those of the brightly coloured pop-up picture books of our childhood.’
A Poet in Cuba
Reinaldo Arenas
‘Perfect totalitarian systems have always been in the vanguard: they modify not only the past and the future, but they also abolish the present.’
Brand Leader
Fintan O’Toole
‘It was a clear, uncomplicated space, a brand image, a label that could be stuck on a billion sauce bottles.’
On the Roof
Geoff Dyer
‘Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you—and it's as patient as death.’
Cruising
Kamran Nazeer
‘Over samosas and pakoras and three different kinds of green chilli chutney, she spoke to us about politics.’
Subject+Object
Seamus Heaney
‘Birch is the tree of desire, ashimmer with sexual possibility even when it arrives swathed in botanical Latin.’
My Chess Teacher
Ricardo Lísias
‘The environment, however, wasn’t a hostile one. Though it was filled with the strangest guys in town, they were only there to play.’
