Explore Essays and memoir
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How to Write About Africa
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.’
The Exorcism of Doctor Escudero
Gabi Martínez
‘His body was like a rock. It wasn’t his. It was like he was possessed.’
Self-Made Man
Mark Gevisser
Mark Gevisser examines the personal, political and social issues of transgender identity in America.
Passport Control
Kwame Dawes
‘I am Ghanaian. This is my legal label. I was born there. It is my inheritance.’
Into the Cosmos
Chloe Aridjis
‘In those fervently atheist times, it wasn’t God or his angelic messengers who would come forth from the sky, but the cosmonaut.’
A Walk to Kobe
Haruki Murakami
‘What I’m talking about is a different sea, and different mountains.’ Haruki Murakami walks to his hometown after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.
Outside the Whale
Salman Rushdie
‘For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell, ‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own world-view.’
War in Donbas
Julian Evans
Six days on the front lines of Ukraine’s ongoing battle with pro-Russian separatists
Frankenstein’s Mother
Darcey Steinke
‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’
Travel Notes About Death
Susana Moreira Marques
‘The first notes I take are about a man who was born, grew up, worked, was married, had a daughter, grew old, and died in the same village.’
Tommy
Donald Ray Pollock
‘I began working at the Mead Paper Company in Chillicothe, Ohio, in the summer of 1973.’
