Rachel Cusk

‘War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself.’

Kevin Breathnach

‘It has been several weeks since I slept for more than an hour, and lately I’ve been feeling on the verge of cracking up.’

Janice Galloway

‘I admit the sneaking feeling, just now and then, that those who govern us think we’re the problem.’

Tim Beckett

‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.

Kao Kalia Yang

‘Time cannot erase my memories of fear and shame.’

Issue 136

Suzanne Brøgger

‘My habit of being a dreamer is filled with the joy of melancholy.’

Issue 137

Ivan Chistyakov

‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’

Adam Weymouth

‘Climate change, I realise, is already here. Not the drama of it, not yet, but in the mundane.’

Eliza Griswold

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

Javier Zamora

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

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.’

Mika Taylor

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

Diane Cook

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

Lucy Caldwell