Kathleen Murray

‘Wasn’t it possible the mental shit would leave the kid’s brain, cell by cell, just by doing normal stuff?’

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.’

April Ayers Lawson

She shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

‘It thrills and delights me that I can now watch concerts I would’ve given several fingers to go to in the ’90s, albeit wonky though these videos are.’

Siobhán Mannion

Siobhán Mannion shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Issue 134

Jaan Kaplinski

‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’

Carmen Maria Machado

Noelle Kocot-Tomblin

‘The implication of Iago’s silence is that there is no hope for his redemption’ Noelle Kocot-Tomblin on ‘Othello’.

F.T. Kola

‘I too quiver. I resonate with the music that vibrates within her.’

Issue 135

Mary O’Donoghue

‘If he fell in I would jump straight after, I would plumb through water not cold so much as oily, and dark as a dirty wine bottle.’

Marie NDiaye

‘We were hoping for a communion, and that communion never came.’

Nuala O’Connor

‘Tonight there is a moon-rind, a nicotined fingernail, hanging low over the lake; above it, a Swarovski sparkler of a star.’

Thomas Kilroy

‘Like most wars, this was a war of the young.’ Thomas Kilroy on his parents’ experience of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish civil war.

Lisa McInerney

‘His aberrations are formless; he imagines his insanity as a sort of gaseous molecule, looking to react with bugs and glitches.’