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Explore Essays and memoir

Victim and Accused

Vidyan Ravinthiran

‘I’m curious about the refusal to countenance a connection between disparate experiences – a route by which empathy could travel.’

Abbandonati

Rory Gleeson

‘One day, 200 people’s X-rays showed they needed intensive care in order to survive.’

Al-Birr Islamic Trust Morgue, Greenwich Islamic Centre, April 2020

Gus Palmer & Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

‘Palmer’s portraits of Kafil Ahmed sit alongside those of other people risking their lives to take care of others.’

The Mezzanine, or: The Most Important Book About Nothing You’ll Ever Read

Joel Golby

‘It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either.’

Death Takes the Lagoon

Ariel Saramandi

Ariel Saramandi on the sinking of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius.

The Valley and the Stream

Danyl McLauchlan

‘Why does serotonin make you happy? How does it affect mood? What is mood? What is depression? How does any of this stuff work?’

Notes on Craft

Ho Sok Fong

‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’

Notes on Craft

Natascha Bruce

‘The reader doesn’t need to have answers, but they do need to have theories.’

Bleak Midwinter

Catherine Taylor

‘In a sense, we had been waiting for the Ripper to visit for months, even years.’

Notes on Craft

Rebecca Watson

I was possessed, for a year, by a woman whose name I do not know.

Laundry Bills and Manifestos

Francesca Wade

‘The great pleasure of archive work lies in searching for these secrets known and unknown.’

Having and Being Had

Eula Biss

‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’

Disorientation

Ian Williams

‘The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting.’

On Running

Larissa Pham

‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’