V. V. Ganeshananthan

‘It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn.’

Edmund Clark

‘His mail became part of the control process his interrogators exercised.’

Isabel Hilton

‘Anniversaries, of course, can be a two-edged sword: they invite historical reappraisal.’

Susan Power

‘I am the unlikely interlacing of two families who never thought their histories would braid together.’

Mavis Gallant

‘When I happened to be working all day, every day, on a story set in the Paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of the cars, the casual clothing and clean facades of the 1990s.’

Gabriel Gbadamosi

‘The basic social contract that I won’t break the law by being in a riot and that, in return, my society will keep me safe is being ripped apart in this confrontation with the hard reality of violence: we must break them or they will break us.’

Natalie Bakopoulos

‘This June, I arrived in Athens just in time for a strike that had halted the metro from the airport to the city.’

Miroslav Penkov

‘Few people can pinpoint where Bulgaria is on the map. Some people might tell you they can, but you shouldn’t believe them.’

Rayko Baychev

‘If they tell you there’s no instrument more thankless than the gadulka, you better believe it.’

Issue 116

Ahmed Errachidi & Clive Stafford Smith

‘There was no horizon, no life and nothing to see.’

Sophie Lewis

‘Five months after I moved to Rio de Janeiro, on a Monday at around ten at night while doing the washing up, I managed to cut my hand deeply and bloodily on a chipped plate.’

A.L. Kennedy

‘I was tempted to let the pages blow overboard and start again...But they have very stern laws about littering at sea.’

Alf Kjetil Walgermo

‘Could we somehow have avoided feeding the killer at our own breast?’

David McConnell