‘Here, then, is the inevitable clarion call to Prynne sceptics: read, read quickly, submit to the strange music, resist the cop in your head, be persuaded to rejoice, let the healing fountain start.’
Will Fleming on J. H. Prynne.
Essay | Ophrys, or Of Seduction by Alicia Kopf
‘Modern biology strengthens what Darwin already noted: nature experiments constantly with sex and gender, without being reduced to any single pattern.’
Alicia Kopf on Darwin, sexual selection and orchids.
Essay | Sylvia, the Ghost Writer by Melanie McGee Bianchi
‘If she’s tampering with me and my middlebrow money-grubbing from some supernatural plane, perhaps it’s just another chore to check off for the overachiever who once journaled, “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless”.’
Melanie McGee Bianchi on Sylvia Plath’s guest editorship of Mademoiselle and Plath’s cult of perpetuity.
Interview | Post-Pastoral: An Interview with Zakia Sewell
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
Review | Common People by Fonie Mitsopoulou
‘The novel’s central question is this: can afflicted people find community and security outside of the households they were born into, or is everyone willing to manipulate and deceive those around them if the situation calls for it?’
Fonie Mitsopoulou reviews Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow.
Interview | Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe
‘I lean on the Clive James idea that a poem is the only art form where you can order a coffee, and even before the drink has gone cold, you could have written something that will still be read in five hundred years’ time.’
Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe.
Interview | Will Self on the End of Satire, the Rise of Fascism and Writing His Own Death
‘Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence.’
Alex Dommett speaks to Will Self.
Poetry | Monrovia, 2010 by Nathaniel Calhoun
‘there were war criminals around. that was / in the air. in our ice cubes. it made you feel like a decent guy.’
New poetry by Nathaniel Calhoun.
Fiction | The Overpass by Jiaqi Kang
‘All those who disappeared had to come back. Or at least, they had to announce their intention to disappear before they disappeared. Otherwise, how would anybody know?’
Awarded second place in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2025, ‘The Overpass’ by Jiaqi Kang.
Poetry | Dear Dolly by Jasmine Gibbs
‘And when // they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia, / it was almost a mercy.’
New poetry by Jasmine Gibbs.
Essay | The Windy Moors of Đà Lạt by Nguyễn Bình
‘Perhaps, in Wuthering Heights, Nhất Linh saw a likeness of what was happening around him: endless divisions and cycles of violence, one side propped up as the opposite of an oppressive other, only to show itself just as capable of oppression as that sworn enemy.’
Nguyễn Bình on Nhất Linh’s Vietnamese translation of Wuthering Heights.
Review | Hawai‘i: Another United Kingdom by Alex Wong
‘“Fearsome” is a word I heard almost as soon as I stepped into the gallery. And perhaps this is a good corrective to the soft, all-giving image of Hawai‘i as the paradisal realm of flower-garlanded aloha. There isn’t a hula girl anywhere in sight here.’
Alex Wong reviews ‘Hawai‘i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans’ at the British Museum.
Poetry | Consumers, Global Capitalists, Environmentalists, Weirdos by Stephen Kampa
‘the global capitalists / were thrilled, too, because to make / every consumable product organic, // a veritable living thing, is to guarantee / perpetual repeated / obsolescence’
New poetry from Stephen Kampa.
Fiction | What Are You Reading? by Madeleine Stein
‘And then, finally, what really puzzled him: what, I mean, what were women? What was it about them, as a group, that had always made him a little wary? They suddenly seemed too wearying an abstraction, like the geometry of curved space.’
New fiction by Madeleine Stein.
Essay | Liftoff: On Writing and Flight by Larissa Pham
‘There’s a certain kind of force that’s required to set off a novel, a tension that’s been built before the start of the book – call it backstory, call it the setup, call it the inciting event: it’s what needs to be in place for the story to begin.’
Larissa Pham on fiction and flights.
Interview | Folk for the Future: An Interview with Lally MacBeth
‘For folk to make sense now, it has to change to reflect communities and the times that we live in. It doesn’t make sense to cling desperately to the past.’
Rose Brookfield interviews Lally MacBeth
Interview | In Conversation with Rob Doyle
‘I feel that each book I write, and particularly each novel, becomes a monument to a phase of life, and more often than not to the crisis it coincides with.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Rob Doyle.
Review | On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist 2025 by Dominic Leonard
‘It is easy to bemoan the quality of poetry’s decline, when in fact the quantity of good stuff published each year has stayed relatively constant, if you know where to look and whose judgement to trust.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.
Interview | Camilla Grudova on Sentimentality, Short Forms and Being Gross
‘There’s a wonderful quote from an Angela Carter story, in which one character says to another, “Bowels are a great leveller.” And I think that’s true.’
Devki Panchmatia interviews Camilla Grudova.
Essay | Remembering John Burnside in The Empire of Forgetting by Callum MacKillop
‘When I learned Burnside had died, I wondered if I had a claim to grief, and if I did, whether it was for the poet I admired or the generous teacher I had come to know.’
Callum MacKillop on John Burnside’s Empire of Forgetting.
The Best Books of 2025
From reissued classics, theory and art criticism to poetry, fiction, biography and even a memetic fiction born out of niche internet subcultures, here are The London Magazine’s Best Books of 2025.
Interview | Lillian Fishman on Sex, Self-Knowledge and Psychoanalysis
‘I’m not interested at all in critiquing what’s wrong in our culture. I’m interested in what attracts us to its seedier elements. And attraction in general.’
Emmeline Armitage speaks to Lillian Fishman.
The London Magazine Writing Retreat at The Mill, France
From June 14th–21st 2026, join The London Magazine on a restorative and productive creative writing retreat at The Mill, France.
While our editorial team will be on hand throughout the week to lead workshops, facilitate conversations and offer one-to-one editorial feedback, the retreat is designed so that you can write at your own pace.
Renesha Dhanraj wins The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025
The judges of The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025 award first place to Renesha Dhanraj for her story, ‘Black Cake’, with second and third place awarded to Jordan Hayward and Jonathan Edwards, respectively.