An interview with Tahmima Anam, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal Trilogy, which chronicles three generations of the Haque family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day. Her debut novel, A Golden Age, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. It was followed in 2011 by The Good Muslim. The final instalment in the trilogy, Shipbreaker, was published in 2014 by Canongate in the UK and HarperCollins in the US. She lives in Hackney, east London, with her husband, the musician and inventor Roland Lamb.
More about the author →Saskia Vogel is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Her debut novel Permission was published in five languages. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. Vogel has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles from Swedish into English, including works by Linnea Axelsson, Johanne Lykke Holm, Balsam Karam, Karolina Ramqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Lina Wolff and Jessica Schiefauer, whose Girls Lost was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears won the Firecracker Award for fiction. Vogel’s writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and longlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. She was Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. You can read her work in the New Yorker, LitHub, the New York Times, the White Review, the Offing, Elsewhere and elsewhere. Photograph © Fette Sans
More about the author →‘Two ways a man can go here, in the direction of God or the direction of believing there is nothing up there but a sun that will kill you whether you pray five times or not.’
Tahmima Anam shares a playlist of songs to write to.
‘If I had known it would put a continent between me and my children I would have killed that map-maker myself.’
‘At night her friends let loose and relax.’
Photography by Vera Yijun Zhou of house parties and clubs in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing.
‘That icy fear of the morning after slithered back: why does summer always feel like it belongs to someone else?’
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