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Explore Essays and memoir

Notes on Craft

Scholastique Mukasonga

‘It was the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis that made me a writer.’

Invisible Loyalty

Jan Morris

An essay on Welsh identity from Allegorizings, the final book from the late Jan Morris.

The Translator I Never Wanted to Be

Mariam Rahmani

‘Translation had always struck me as unsexy. Or perhaps something more insidious than that.’

On translating In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali.

Notes on Craft

Lucie Elven

‘I make a list of accidents – sentences I’ve misread with my misreading left in them.’

A Hunger

Fran Lock

Both has a way of being neither.’

An essay by Fran Lock from the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love.

Replace Me

Amber Husain

On neoliberalism’s psychic toll.

Notes from an Island

Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pieitilä

‘When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice.’

An excerpt from Notes from an Island, with artwork by Tuulikki Pietilä and memoir by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal.

The Overspill

Elaine L. Wang

Elaine L. Wang remembers friendship, flag-raising ceremonies and class elections at elementary school in Beijing.

Larger than an Orange

Lucy Burns

An excerpt from Larger than an Orange, a book by Lucy Burns about abortion.

Notes on Craft

Lauren Elkin

On journal keepers, from Sei Shōnagon to Susan Sontag.

Talismans of Blood and Memory

Philip Kurian

On the worldwide campaign to return sacred objects to the ancestral communities from which they were taken.

Chase Scene

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy remembers her partner, the poet Kevin Killian.

The Sum of Life’s Troubles Makes a Whole Damn Dish

Nuraliah Norasid

‘I have become the muscle of the operation, folding butter and egg yolks into the flour and kneading all two kilograms of dough’.

Nuraliah Norasid on women’s work.