Photograph © The Guardian
Granta Best of Young British novelist Kamila Shamsie talks to John Freeman about love, war and citizenship.
Photograph © The Guardian
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Kamila Shamsie was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1973. She has received degrees from Hamilton College, Clinton, New York and the University of Massachusetts. This is her first novel.
More about the author →John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman's and an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He is also the author and editor of eleven books, including Dictionary of the Undoing; There's a Revolution Outside, My Love (co-edited with Tracy K Smith), and Wind, Trees, a new collection of poems. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and been translated into more than twenty languages. Once a month he hosts The California Book Club, an online discussion of a classic book of golden state literature for Alta magazine. He lives in New York City.
More about the author →A conversation between Kamila Shamsie and Sunjeev Sahota.
‘There’s a certain adrenaline rush that comes from not knowing.’ Kamila Shamsie on writing the unsaid, the challenges of adapting Antigone and the role of the novel in politics.
PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer – we stand in solidarity with writers who have suffered persecution exercising their freedom of expression.
‘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.’
‘Fundamentalist mangoes must have more texture; secular mangoes should have artificial flavouring.’
‘I grew obsessed with the place, thinking that getting to see it, to experience it, would make the pain of that fall go away.’
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