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

Todd McEwen

‘Characteristically my wife refused to be drawn into the situation while I became obsessed with it.’

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.’

Linda Mannheim

‘There is nothing where the Towers should be but smoke. There are no buildings.’

Colin Herd

‘I wear my fear around me / I fan it out on my pillow’

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.’

Issue 148

Te-Ping Chen

‘I tell myself it doesn’t do to fixate too much on the dead: apart from everything else, they can’t answer you.’

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.

Patrick Cottrell

‘It began with the ant farm in second grade.’

Crispin Best

‘i feel good like a person / holding flowers on a train / feels dumb’