‘I’ve always been in the minority, you say with defiant pride, upon reading Hippocrates’ conclusion that one third of patients get better on their own, one third don’t respond to treatment, and one third benefit from it.’
New fiction by Mimi Kawahara.
‘I think my overwhelming feeling writing that poem and reading it out now is one of ‘trappedness’. Anger at being trapped in the world, in a situation which makes no sense, with faculties that cannot make sense of it. The other question is why?’
Shoshana Kessler speaks to poet and editor, Camille Ralphs.
‘When so many bad things have happened to someone, they are automatically a good person. You have to be nice to them. Their misfortune creates a magnetic field of deflection.’
New Fiction by Emily Waugh.
‘Poetry is always trying to capture the experience of living a human life, which is an impossible task. Poets come close, but of course, always fail. Life is simply too complicated, too individual, too big. But the best poets, in my opinion, are the ones who manage to conjure feeling and keep mystery. And, of course, sprinkle in some humour to not take the whole thing too seriously.’
The third in our Forward Prize for Poetry interview series, Leyla Josephine and Michael Pederson.
‘The Palestinian people have been dealing with variable, accelerating modes of their erasure and absenting in English for nearly a century now. I had to write this book.’
The second in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series, Fady Joudah and Sarah Wimbush speak to each other about their collections, […] and STRIKE.
‘Tanet is trying to write something that can’t be so immediately defined, somewhere between a true-story narrative – without the exploitative pitfalls of the genre – and a child’s fantasy story with real-world consequences.’
Esmee Wright reviews Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet.
‘Both women are potters who haven’t made anything, and both women become disillusioned by the empty promise of an artistic career.’
Anna de Vivo reviews Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman.
‘It made sense to me that the theme of sex centres itself in my books about refugees, because when people flee from wars, they often leave with few belongings and sometimes without their families. So, in exile, surrounded by loneliness and scarcity, their bodies become a focal point.’
Olivia Boyle talks to Sulaiman Addonia.
‘I’ve always loved reading. One source of inspiration for me is Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, particularly ‘The Wife of Bath’ prologue. I loved her gruesome language and her humour. She’s a very powerful character.’
Katie Tobin speaks to Ella Walker.
‘Once he’d take the required photographs, he’d move around the set like an angel. No one would see or notice him. He managed to camouflage himself to capture the perfect moment.’
Sara Quattrocchi Febles on Sergio Strizzi at The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
‘One wonderful thing about translation is that the original poem gives you the shape of the beast: ‘all’ the translator has to do is play with the words.’
Victoria Modi-Celda talks to Beverley Bie Brahic.
‘In this chaotic admixture of miserable players, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between aggressor and victim. This leads to the chilling thought that when injustice is empowered and left unchecked, corruption becomes a cycle.’
Miracle Romano reviews Ronaldo Soledad Vivo Jr.’s The Power Above Us All.
‘She did the work during the daytime: dressing him, washing his hair, and giving him his medicine. Most of that time Adrian can’t collate and discern any linearity, nor can he describe with any material details its happenings.’
New fiction by Eamon Doggett.
‘Experience is one thing, but facing the cold facts of the world’s material processes is something else.’
Charlie Taylor reviews Munir Hachemi’s Living Things.
‘People on the street in the daytime come with blurred edges, their faces are grey scribbles in the air.’
New fiction by Cheryl Follon.
‘I’m moving more towards how a writer frames their work to suggest how it might be received – just as Marcel Duchamp presented readymade objects as art. If you take a piece of found text and call it a poem, it will alter how the reader perceives it.’
The first in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series.
‘For a book to be a truly good reissue it should seem outrageous and unjust that it fell out of print in the first place, and Ex-Wife is exactly that.’
Marina Scholtz reviews Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife.
‘It is not displaying tension between styles, but rather the artistic absorption of them.’
Callum Tilley reviews In the Eye of the Storm at the Royal Academy.
‘Did you know the T-Rex / was quite likely an excellent swimmer? / Its skeletal frame light enough to float.’
New poetry by Meredith MacLeod Davidson.
‘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.
‘When you are writing you are immersed in the moment. All that matters is the poem.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to John Barnie.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
