‘Entwining deeply personal stories into a tense political context allows for the exploration of the effects of this context at an individual level that, while fictionalised, is also infused with reality.’
Callum Tilley on politics in art.
Interview | John Barnie on Welsh Identity, Dystopian Verse and the Anthropocene
‘When you are writing you are immersed in the moment. All that matters is the poem.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to John Barnie.
Interview | Eline Arbo on staging Annie Ernaux’s The Years
‘But still, it has this core of universality because it is written in the collective form. We can project our own lives into her stories because she allows us to do so. She invites us in with this ‘we’.’
Eline Arbo on staging The Years, at the Almeida Theatre from 27 July.
Fiction | Flamboyant by Patrick Cash
‘He wondered if it became, at some point, too late to reclaim who you want to be. Maybe some people are just Frankenstein’s personalities, stitched together through the limbs of borrowed traits.’
New fiction by Patrick Cash.
Essay | Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess by Adam Zamoyski
‘The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist.’
Adam Zamoyski on Izabela Czartoryska.
Interview | ‘Is writing about climate change a futile act?’: Daisy Hildyard on The Second Body and Emergency
‘For me, there’s something about fiction and the way meaning is not necessarily on its surface that creates room for a depth; a complexity that I can’t achieve in nonfiction.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to Daisy Hildyard about The Second Body and Emergency.
Guide | London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre
‘In these turbulent times, the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival provides an evermore vital space for democratic discussion and we’re proud to offer a fantastic programme to inspire and nourish the next generation of creators and storytellers.’
Interview | Shanay Jhaveri on Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark
‘The book really circles around the multiplicity of experiences of the night. It is a time for hedonism, but also for work and protest. They exist simultaneously and even unfold concurrently.’
Shanay Jhaveri on Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, out now with Koneig Books.
Interview | Konstantin Akinsha and Katia Denysova on Modernism in Ukraine
‘This blend of cultural retrospection and daring artistic experimentation, fusing the international visual language of avant-garde art trends with distinctive national themes, characterizes Ukrainian art of the period.’
Konstantin Akinsha and Katia Denysova on In the Eye of the Storm, opening 29 June at the Royal Academy.
Interview | Jamieson Webster on Disorganisation & Sex
‘There’s something so powerful about what he can do with an object.’
Katie Tobin speaks to Jamieson Webster, author of Disorganisation & Sex.
Interview | Annie-Rose Fiddian-Green on Breathing With Trees
‘I love the immediacy of the first marks on blank paper. This is often where I can see my own energy coming through.’
Annie-Rose Fiddian-Green on Breathing With Trees, now showing at Brooke-Walder Gallery.
Poetry | Needle by Michael Martin
‘I’m the way she likes anyone left behind — / undeserving, falling.’
New poetry by Michael Martin.
Poetry | Medieval Mystic Margery Kempe in Tesco by Laura Varnam
‘She’s losing tins of custard powder & / baby formula and she’s crushing the body / & blood of Christ under her arm while / John Junior tucks into a doughnut.’
New poetry by Laura Varnam.
Poetry | Vanishing Points by Christopher M James
‘The train driver’s one straight line, as / he calls to mind his schoolboy love / or stillborn child whose name haunts / like an abandoned station.’
New poetry by Christopher M James.
Interview | Michael Deagler on Early Sobrieties by Marina Scholtz
‘Sobriety does get quite uninteresting fairly fast, but if any period of sobriety is interesting, then it’s this.’
Marina Scholtz talks to Michael Deagler about his forthcoming novel, Early Sobrieties.
Poetry | Self Portrait as an Unreliable Narrator by Damen O’Brien
‘But if she was brown-eyed or blue-eyed, / they will not recall, only that her eyes / asked a question that no one could answer.’
New poetry by Damen O’Brien.
Poetry | Punctum by Lisa Kelly
‘If all the protesters were smiling serenely, / would a scowling woman become / the punctum? Or is a scowling woman / too much of a cliché to be a punctum?’
New poetry by Lisa Kelly.
Review | The Radical Vision of Pedro Lemebel by Esmee Wright
‘I hope that, with this collection, the anglophone world will continue to expand its interest in world literature; not just the foreign, but the queer, the poor, the almost untranslatable.’
Esmee Wright reviews Pedro Lemebel’s A Last Summer of Queer Apostles.
Essay | ‘Everything Shapes What It Encounters’: On the Life and Work of John Burnside by Tom Branfoot
‘As he writes in The Music of Time, ‘to make a poem at all is an act of hope’, for a future in which somebody is present, attending to the music and the craft.’
Tom Branfoot remembers the late John Burnside.
Essay | Gravity’s Pull by David Baghdasaryan
The following piece is published as part of our TLM Young Writers series, a dedicated section of The London Magazine‘s website which showcases the work of exceptional young talent aged between 13-21, from the UK and beyond.
Review | Clare Best’s Beyond the Gate
John O’Donoghue Clare Best’s Beyond the Gate . Beyond the Gate, Clare Best, (Worple Press, 2023), 88 pages, £12 .…
Poetry | Glitch by Nicholas Hogg
‘What figure / is the chance that a poet can appear / on praise.’
New poetry from Nicholas Hogg.
Interview | Rowland Bagnall’s Near-Life Experience by Jamie Cameron
‘But language often fails at being accurate (if accuracy is even the aim), so I’m also interested in the things that writing can and can’t pull off.’
Jamie Cameron talks to Rowland Bagnall about his new collection, Near-Life Experience.
Essay | Pareidolia by Tallulah Griffith
‘I guess maybe that’s called haunting, that magic pull of things akin to those in our glass boxes, things that cannot last.’
New writing by Tallulah Griffith.