‘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.
‘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.
‘I do think, perhaps naïvely, that literature should try to capture something that is essentially unsayable.’
Sruti Basak interviews Ayşegül Savaş.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
Sixty-four years on from the original survey, The London Magazine speaks to fifteen poets, including Jorie Graham, Don Paterson, A. E. Stallings and more, about the state of contemporary poetry.
‘At the cinema people ask questions on process, whereas at the outdoor screenings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a question about process; the audience talk more of themselves, their own experience.’
Lydia de Matos speaks to Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
