Rachel Seiffert reads her work and talks to Granta about writing silences, the inescapability of history, the Troubles and learning to love her characters.
Photograph by Charlie Hopkinson
‘Indigenous chefs will tell you that their dishes are Indigenous, not Canadian. With the plate, these chefs demonstrate that the food is the land, and that the land is still theirs.’
Zoe Tennant profiles Andrew George, a Wet’suwet’en chef.
‘Each bite exploded temporally, an exquisite blend of past and future that put you firmly in the present moment.’
Barclay Bram on Sichuanese cuisine.
‘This might seem a lot of biographical significance to attribute to a single bad experience with a shepherd's pie.’
John Lanchester on what to eat during winter.
‘The banana is a gentle, sweet, ingenuous child. The plantain is a more complex adult.’
Héctor Abad Faciolince on Colombian food, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean.
‘The team here makes 3,500 to 4,000 pieces of viennoiserie a week. That’s forty-four kilos of dough a day, one third of which is butter.’
Fatima Bhutto learns to make the perfect croissant.
‘So, to summarise: witty, bold, and delicate too. Oh yes, and supremely able to turn a story.’
‘Dark red hair. Wee skirt and trainers, bare arms. All those freckles.’
‘A story that starts with a bereavement: already I’m drawn in.’
‘The bushes grow dense across the top of the drop, but Martin can just see through the leaves: young mother and son, swimming in the pool hollowed out by the waterfall.’
‘None of these people give a shit that a flock of birds is going to choke to death on those balloons, be they pink or blue.’
Fiction by Dainerys Machado Vento, translated by Will Vanderhyden.
