For Dr Bruno Ceolin
Some words
trip me
in my second tongue.
I say
pepino – cucumber
when I mean
pimienta – pepper.
Confuse
ginebra – gin,
when I mean
ginger – jengibre.
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‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
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A poem by Sandra Cisneros.
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Dee Peyok on craft and the Cambodian musician: Sinn Sisamouth.
‘It was a commonplace / to enter the woods / with meat, lay it on the ground, then / wait for what might come.’
Poetry by Michael Bazzett.
‘Ungraceful, the heart boinks: / drugged, suspended, spiderwebbed – ’
Four poems by Katie Farris.
‘Poetry’s strongest response, on the other hand, is determined, open-ended world-making, which is the work of empathy.’
