Writing

Vahni Capildeo said in a 2012 interview with Zannab Sheikh that ‘poetry is a form of concentration’. Her latest collection, Measures of Expatriation, puts...

  I’ve never really given it a thought – how a pearl is made, at least not until I went to the extensive Pearls exhibition...

A Fortnight of Tears is a major new exhibition of works by acclaimed British artist Tracey Emin. The show features features a large selection...

Over a cup of Marco Polo And a bowl of bird's nest soup, Listening to the world as a whole Through the particular, I laugh Into the telephone...

Lauded as a subversive masterpiece, pegged as a favourite to win The Man Booker Prize and one of the best-selling novels of 2015, A Little...

Patrick Maxwell Tony Harrison: Poetry & Class The use of poetry as a form of class war has arguably never had particularly significant results in much of...

Made up of three L-shaped levels, Christina Reihill's Glad I did it is an invitation into the mind and last days of Ruth Ellis,...

The exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery differs from William Rubin’s one on Picasso’s portraits twenty years ago at MOMA by defining Picasso’s portraits...

Exile “I rested my mouth on your memory” ~ Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of Exile Night arrives like a cart You push it with motionless hands There is darkness But...

The following piece by the post-war experimental writer Ann Quin (1936-1973) was originally published in the July 1966 issue of The London Magazine, but...

An evening at the Southbank Centre is always going to be enlightening and entertaining - this is never more true than during the London...

With the protagonists of their respective novels being so similar, it is perhaps little surprise that the writers Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler struck...

Tom Jeffreys “What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” Some notes on the art of Yelena Popova, Joanna Rajkowska, and Jan Eric Visser April is...

At first you see the bodies and ask yourself why – that is how the story begins, how the narrative unravels, how you are...

Bringing iconic films to the main screen, from Clockwork Orange to The Shining, Stanley Kubrick has contributed significantly to 20th century popular culture.  The...

You ask how my week has been? I've been in lockdown now for 3 weeks or so, though I might've lost count. I have plenty to keep me busy in the house here, plus I have responsibility towards my 3 cats. And then there's dreamtime, between 4 & 6 in the morning. But suddenly I felt days back this ennui coming on, like, did the poetry suddenly disappear? Sometimes I'm concerned—but just for a moment mind you—whether I can match or even better the last one? There's no way [...]

Lucy Pearson runs The Literary Edit book blog and @the_litedit on Instagram. She has over 11,000 followers and has been blogging since 2012, and...

I recently spent a week in an unremarkable town in South West England. Throughout the day, which I spent alone, I found myself feeling trapped and anxious.

‘Why not just burn everything?’ Sarah puts down her cup and reaches for the bottle. She pours herself more wine. On the table, all the glasses are full. ‘You know we can’t,’ I say. ‘Why not? Let’s just get rid of them, once and for all.’ She gestures at the plants making their way through our windows, through every crack in the walls. Around our kitchen and living room, short green stumps line the edges of the ceiling like sharp poking fingers, their flesh covered with a thin [...]

We look up, & beyond the maple trees & the brick steeples with weathervane roosters, clouds billow as sleeping monsters. Not the sort of billowing that clouds...

-for Heaney and the Peace Bridge Grey and greying sky reflected in choppy body, as our matching heron performs his balancing act for all to see. The Donegal hills,...

In his masterpiece, Enemies of Promise (1938), Cyril Connolly distinguishes between two different styles of writing, which he terms as the ‘Mandarin’ and the ‘Vernacular’. In the former group: Edward Gibbon, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce; among the latter: William Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Christopher Isherwood. Fyodor Dostoevsky is a writer of neither groups [...]

Charting the evolution of Easter Island wooden carvings from spiritual receptacle to auction treasure.   Allow me to take you on a small journey to Easter...

The London Magazine has long been a champion of emerging writers and independent publishers, stretching back to the 1950s and 60s, when young writers...