‘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.
‘For me, there’s something about fiction and the way meaning is not necessarily on its surface that creates room for a depth; a complexity that I can’t achieve in nonfiction.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to Daisy Hildyard about The Second Body and Emergency.
‘The book really circles around the multiplicity of experiences of the night. It is a time for hedonism, but also for work and protest. They exist simultaneously and even unfold concurrently.’
Shanay Jhaveri on Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, out now with Koneig Books.
‘This blend of cultural retrospection and daring artistic experimentation, fusing the international visual language of avant-garde art trends with distinctive national themes, characterizes Ukrainian art of the period.’
Konstantin Akinsha and Katia Denysova on In the Eye of the Storm, opening 29 June at the Royal Academy.
‘There’s something so powerful about what he can do with an object.’
Katie Tobin speaks to Jamieson Webster, author of Disorganisation & Sex.
‘I love the immediacy of the first marks on blank paper. This is often where I can see my own energy coming through.’
Annie-Rose Fiddian-Green on Breathing With Trees, now showing at Brooke-Walder Gallery.
‘I’m the way she likes anyone left behind — / undeserving, falling.’
New poetry by Michael Martin.
‘She’s losing tins of custard powder & / baby formula and she’s crushing the body / & blood of Christ under her arm while / John Junior tucks into a doughnut.’
New poetry by Laura Varnam.
‘The train driver’s one straight line, as / he calls to mind his schoolboy love / or stillborn child whose name haunts / like an abandoned station.’
New poetry by Christopher M James.
