‘It seems as though we have gone through the painting and are living inside the vanishing point: creating the means of our own self-effacement, using them, bemoaning their existence and continuing to use them anyway.’
Zoe Guttenplan on invisible media, AI and the age of sameness.
‘In his own life, money had been nearly but never wholly absent, manifested in quantities of just-barely- and almost-enough.’
Short fiction by Adrian Nathan West.
‘So what that it was okay to call it / a day? Does delight ever feel done? And hell / will come, whether or not you schedule it.’
New poetry by Nasim Luczaj.
‘We’re going now, I said, // to say something definite. / And when the car began its song / the street sang it back, // all lamentation.’
New poetry by Rachel Curzon.
‘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.
‘I don’t want to exaggerate, / but I could be happy anywhere. Together, / our losses make a home, wouldn’t you say?’
New poetry by Daniel Addercouth.
‘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.
‘When I learned Burnside had died, I wondered if I had a claim to grief, and if I did, whether it was for the poet I admired or the generous teacher I had come to know.’
Callum MacKillop on John Burnside’s Empire of Forgetting.
‘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 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 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.
‘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.
