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Jianan Qian | First Sentence

Jianan Qian

‘For every witness, history unfolded at some other time, and in some other place.’ Jianan Qian on the first sentence of her story, ‘To the Dogs’.

Julia Armfield | First Sentence

Julia Armfield

‘A first line is a threat, I think.’ Julia Armfield on the first sentence of her story ‘Longshore Drift’.

Notebooks

Amitava Kumar

‘I wanted sex as my subject, not only the innocence but also the bruising.’

Amit Chaudhuri | First Sentence

Amit Chaudhuri

‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’

Kelly Magee | First Sentence

Kelly Magee

‘Mothers: our first source of love, our first heartbreak.’

First Sentence: Javier Zamora

Javier Zamora

‘Immigration has become a physical thing, like a tumor inside us, between us.’

First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue

Mary O’Donoghue

‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’

First Sentence: Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold

‘This, of course, was years before anyone knew or cared who Boko Haram was.’

First Sentence: Mika Taylor

Mika Taylor

‘I didn’t want reality to overwrite the story that was forming in my head.’

Greg Jackson | First Sentence

Greg Jackson

‘I am being, I believe, about as forthright as I am being coy.’

First Sentence: Molly Brodak

Molly Brodak

‘A name is a single small token of selfhood issued at birth, upon which all the rest of one’s person must be built.’

Anjali Joseph | First Sentence

Anjali Joseph

‘I kept returning to the Beckett stories, a favourite since I came upon them in my late teens.’

Cynthia Ozick | First Sentence

Cynthia Ozick

‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’

First Sentence: Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

‘We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity.’