David Treuer

David Treuer on learning to fence with Maître Michel Sebastiani and learning to write with Toni Morrison.

Lily Dunn

Lily Dunn on her father’s losing battle with alcoholism.

Issue 137

Aatish Taseer

‘That first sight of the city curled around the river goes through me like the breath of something old and known and familiar.’ Aatish Taseer revisits Varanasi.

Lorna Gibb

‘I puzzled over the language but disentangled its meaning slowly, carefully, eager to connect’ Lorna Gibb on Shakespeare’s Juliet.

Madeleine Bunting

‘Brexit demonstrates one of England’s most trusted strategies of power: deliberate forgetfulness.’

Xiaolu Guo

‘I had lost my native country, now I was going to lose a continent.’

Kevin Barry

‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’

Anna Badkhen

‘The sea is broken,’ they say. An empty net at night: a drooping lattice of shiny nothingness, a cold and worthless tinsel mesh.

Issue 137

Lauren Hough

‘Our pasts are so unbelievable we need a witness for our own memory.’

Issue 137

Matilda Gustavsson

Cal Flyn

‘I was going north to find a tree farm, in a land where there are no trees.’