‘I started to see that I was writing about the little things in life, or the little things in town, and I would relate that attentiveness to not liking change.’
An interview with Nathan Dragon.
Burning Love: An Interview with Pol Guasch
‘We tend to think of disaster as something that arrives with one overwhelming voice and destroys everything. And, of course, it does. But at the same time, people still have to love each other. They still have to find hope.’
An interview with Pol Guasch.
The Hills Are Alive (with the Sound of Screaming) by Joey Connolly
‘The agents of technocapital imagine themselves as the new saviours of humanity, the new bringers of fire. Each imagines himself a little postmodern Prometheus. But Prometheus was punished.’
Joey Connolly asks why reality is screaming.
Formal Restlessness | Restless Formlessness: In Conversation with Terrance Hayes
‘Writing is lonely all the time. Sometimes you can get a little bit of fortification in groups, but never think that it’s not a lonely practice. There’s no organisation that’s going to take away that quality of loneliness.’
Finola Cahill interviews Terrance Hayes.
Wat Happened by Joseph Williams
‘The central achievement of Doom Painting is not to show how the past has shaped us (an obvious enough move for any historical novelist), but rather to emphasise how far the present lives within the past.’
Joseph Williams reviews Doom Painting.
I Remind Myself by Jane Hirshfield
‘Everywhere beings who worry, who notice birthdays, who war. / And still, existence’s single dice-throw – / the wish to go on, over not.’
Poetry by Jane Hirshfield.
Puking Abadan: Dylan Thomas in Iran by Kasra Lang
‘Thomas spends much of his letters from Iran begging his wife to forgive his various infidelities. What’s sometimes lost in this personal story is that he had arrived in Iran at an extraordinary time, a period of high intrigue not only in the country’s history but in the wider drama of the twentieth century.’
Kasra Lang on Dylan Thomas’s 1951 trip to Iran.
Diane Williams: ‘My form is my form.’
‘Early on I found that what was painful in my life, when objectified on the page, gave me a sensation of power.’
Heather Cass White interviews Diane Williams.
‘And We Too Love Football…’: The Bronze Gazelle and the Egyptian King by A. Naji Bakhti
‘When I recently bumped into the famed nephew of Jamal Khatib on the beaches of Beirut, five-thousand four-hundred miles from where we had last seen one another and over a decade later, it was his toothy grin I recognised first.’
A. Naji Bakhti on Jamal Khatib.
Ayşegül Savaş on Friendship, Motherhood and the Necessity of Solitude
‘I do think, perhaps naïvely, that literature should try to capture something that is essentially unsayable.’
Sruti Basak interviews Ayşegül Savaş.
Domenico Starnone on Old Age, Ambition and the Literary Game
‘For me, that is what writing is: placing the obstacles at the centre and telling the story of the failures and attempts to overcome them.’
An interview with Domenico Starnone.
Back to the Future by Georgie Fooks
‘What alternatives might there be to Schwarzman’s vision of the humanities? Is there a way to reject the co-option of the humanities into the service of technology, profit and optimisation?’
Georgie Fooks on the Schwarzman Centre and the future of the humanities.
Comfort and Its Discontents by Devki Panchmatia
‘While it must be stressed that Rankine’s lyric practice is capacious and stylistically thrilling, that her insights are always valuable in isolation, I am left slightly unsure of what Triage’s greater intentions are.’
Devki Panchmatia on Claudia Rankine.
The Scale Against Poetry: Tony Harrison’s Prose by Dane Holt
‘Partly due to critical neglect, partly due to the single-minded determination to be a poet who survived on nothing but his poetry, Harrison’s prose is doomed to be a footnote in his career.’
Dane Holt on Tony Harrison’s underappreciated prose.
It’s a Devil of a Gap by Alex Niven
‘Might there be something, beyond backwater nihilism, in the vanishing of the Tree at Sycamore Gap that speaks to us about a country increasingly unable to protect its social and civic structures in the most basic ways?’
Alex Niven on the Sycamore Gap and cycles of decline.
The New Religious Radicals by Martín Francisco Saps
‘Growing up in suburban Chicago, I was often told that there were two topics I should never raise with strangers: politics and religion. This was a time where secular individualism was the ultimate marker of freedom.’
Martín Francisco Saps on the rise of a new religious politics.
Aea Varfis-van Warmelo: ‘There is no such thing as a reliable narrator.’
‘There is no such thing as a reliable narrator, and efforts to achieve real truth often destroy it.’
Harriet Armstrong interviews Aea Varfis-van Warmelo.
‘I don’t go to poetry to feel better’: An Interview with Victoria Chang
‘How do you write silence? That’s what I’m trying to do. How do you write death before you’ve experienced it? That’s what I’m trying to do.’
Luke Dunne interviews Victoria Chang.
Capitalism Against Itself: An Interview with Hettie O’Brien
‘A water company running up debts to enrich its investors is permissible, but a government that borrows to invest in the public realm, not so much.’
Sruti Basak interviews Hettie O’Brien.
Mariana Enriquez: Seven Questions
‘Why would you do that – visit cemeteries?’ is a sentiment often expressed to me, voicing some kind of disgust, as if I did something like, I don’t know, collect vomit.
Konrad Muller interviews Mariana Enriquez.
A Libidinal Legacy by Gabrielle Sicam
‘Once I knew I was writing about Crumb, I knew I wanted to write about perversion.’
Gabrielle Sicam on comics artist Robert Crumb.
Tap-dancing to the Sounds of a Machine Room by Luke Dunne
‘Cities, as Brecht depicts them, live double lives. Their inhabitants live cheek to jowl and are given to exchanging pleasantries and meaningless conversation ad nauseam.’
Luke Dunne on Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘Of Poor B.B.’
Helen When Asked by Nina Reljić
‘My face was not the most beautiful / but any person was entitled to think it was / and what terrifying pleasure in that.’
Nina Reljić’s winning poem in this year’s Poetry Prize.
A Very British Revolt by John Merrick
‘Britain, whoever is in power, is a small-c conservative place.’
John Merrick on the 1926 General Strike.