Explore Essays and memoir
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Primitive Child
Jason Allen-Paisant
‘My roots seemed to be in the ocean; the ocean being symbolic of my absent father.’
Memoir by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Confluences
Kate Harris
‘The creek was fringed with tall grass and clear as breath.’
Kate Harris in the Taku River Tlingit First Nation.
From the Center of the World to the End of the World
Eliane Brum
‘For tourists to have this “experience”, six scientists were obliged to interrupt their research and wait until that afternoon, when the weather turned and time in the field shrank.’
Translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.
I Know What Spring Is Like: Clarice, Crônicas and Corcovado
Sinéad Gleeson
‘A state of grace, Lispector writes, should be short-lived, episodic.’
Sinéad Gleeson on Clarice Lispector’s Brazil.
Slime
Susanne Wedlich
‘We are all creatures of slime, but some of us are more creative than others’.
An excerpt from the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Slime.
Notes on Craft
Scholastique Mukasonga
‘It was the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis that made me a writer.’
Invisible Loyalty
Jan Morris
An essay on Welsh identity from Allegorizings, the final book from the late Jan Morris.
The Translator I Never Wanted to Be
Mariam Rahmani
‘Translation had always struck me as unsexy. Or perhaps something more insidious than that.’
On translating In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali.
Notes on Craft
Lucie Elven
‘I make a list of accidents – sentences I’ve misread with my misreading left in them.’
A Hunger
Fran Lock
‘Both has a way of being neither.’
An essay by Fran Lock from the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love.
Notes from an Island
Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pieitilä
‘When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice.’
An excerpt from Notes from an Island, with artwork by Tuulikki Pietilä and memoir by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal.
