‘The words of reassurance assume something like this: David remains David, whatever happens, as long as someone remembers who he was. But I kept asking myself: When was he who he really was? When exactly was that? And what’s to say that it is not right now?’
Caleb Klaces on dementia and fiction.
‘Both his Poems and Letters, in different registers, show a private poet courting lyric publicity and cultivating a voice of guarded ambiguity: memorable, yes, but sacrificing true risk for renown.’
Jack Barron reviews Seamus Heaney’s collected Poems and Letters.
‘Sitting across the ornate coffee table from my husband, I felt as if I was seeing him for the first time. I told him so, somewhat jokingly, but mainly to crush the silence that had overtaken us, and was about to add, At least we can finally catch our breath, eh? but then I was overcome by the feeling of telling a lie, so I kept the rest to myself.’
Winner of The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025.
‘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 interview 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.
‘While toxic figures with millions of online followers dominate the cultural conversation about masculinity, Szalay’s novels offer a more honest account of male experience. In short, most men are losers.’
Guy Stagg reviews David Szalay’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Flesh.
‘Sandy had decimated our marine life and scarred our coastline, and then came the developers to carve up the carcass. These days, the new residents have a saying for the remaining pre-Sandy locals: the leftovers.’
Gabrielle Showalter recalls Hurricane Sandy.
‘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.
‘Pools are a curious manipulation of the natural. Where the sea performs feeling, unbreakable and unending, the reality of the pool is one trapped, much like the icons of this era, in aesthetic permanence.’
Emmeline Armitage on the symbol of the swimming pool.
‘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.
‘Diaspora life comes with its own kind of weight. We’re not in the rubble, but we carry it inside us. That contradiction, being physically far but emotionally tied in, is a big part of what it means to be Palestinian in exile.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Mai Serhan.
‘It was in moments like these that Pablo questioned whether ambition could be vaster than this: the ocean, the magnanimity of drunkenness around old friends, the heart-tug of seeing private concerns etched into their faces, all the sorrows he once believed would also be his.’
New short fiction by Jimin Kang.
‘To love the natural world is to take care of it, to allow it to be free, just as we often wish to be ourselves, and to carefully manage the downsides and difficulties of human exploration.’
Christiana Spens on land access rights in the UK.
‘I was, in that moment, the thirty-four-year-old lecturer discussing the craft of writing with a young British student in my office at Aberystwyth University on Penglais hill. I was, also, the fifteen-year-old boy in his parent’s bathroom on the sixth floor of an old building in Beirut sheltering from Israeli airstrikes of 2006.’
A. Naji Bakhti on Beirut, Gaza and Glangwili.
‘Several broadly millennial acquaintances confess that reading the book made them feel a sort of sickening recognition.’
Zsófia Paulikovics on Perfection and Allegro Pastel.
Yasmina Snyder spoke to writers, poets, musicians and event organisers based in London about the connections between live music and poetry, and the spaces that host them.
‘There’s big trouble in the world of little magazines. In the last two years, an alarming number have vanished into that second-hand bookshop in the sky. Each leaves the world a little quieter, a little poorer.’
Tristram Fane Saunders on ‘little magazines’.
‘Jesus doesn’t cure her, she cures herself. But if there were no Jesus for her to believe in then she couldn’t cure herself. I find that very powerful. There is a synergy there close to paradox but not quite.’
New short fiction by Joseph Pierson.
‘Lockwood is taking the real and slipping it through genres in her efforts to capture it, resulting in a portrayal more authentic than straight fiction or memoir.’
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay reviews Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You.
‘The ongoing capacity of the sonnet to allow for both chaos and control is one that will ensure its viability even in our increasingly fractious and factional of times.’
Paul Muldoon on the sonnet.
