‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘And when // they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia, / it was almost a mercy.’
New poetry by Jasmine Gibbs.
‘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.
‘“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.
‘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.
‘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
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
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.
‘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 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.
‘You’re probably going to hurt people’s feelings. But you can’t let yourself think about that. You’ve got to stay detached, cool eyed. If you can’t do that, you might as well pack it in and become an academic or something.’
Emmeline Armitage interviews Lili Anolik.
‘Smith is an excellent dissector of power and identity, but conventional party politics are not in her line.’
Hassan Akram reviews Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive.
The February 1962 edition of The London Magazine was dedicated to poetry.
Editor Alan Ross spoke to several poets at the time about their craft and thoughts on poetry, including Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and more.
‘The result is beyond his competence as a writer, but it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to channel alt-lit’s commitment in new directions.’
Hugh Foley reviews Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man.
‘Even if you’re writing in the third person, in that George Eliot-style, zoomed-out voice, every narrator is a person. Who are they? How do they know this stuff? The reader may never know who they are, but you need to know who they are.’
Joseph Williams speaks to Tim MacGabhann.
‘We all have so many things entering into the sensorium at the moment: it’s hard to be mindful and present while also acknowledging that you’re a person in history, with the past alive and all around us.’
Joint winners Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie in conversation.
‘It’s been nice to create that interpersonal feeling that poetry does so well, where you think you’re having this solitary, solo, lonely experience, but then you write it down and perform it, and someone’s like, no, me too!’
A conversation between Bella Cox and Joshua Idehen.
‘What poetry does is give people the scope to simultaneously challenge and champion ideas. It’s good to be able to be critical of anything, even if it’s something you really believe in.’
A conversation between Isabelle Baafi and Michael Mullen.
‘The English language is a colonial weapon; it’s been employed for some of the most gruesome atrocities. How you make something beautiful with that is a troubling question.’
Shortlisted poets Tom Branfoot and Tim Tim Cheng discuss each other’s work.
