In 2019, travel photographer Christopher Wilton-Steer spent four months retracing the Silk Road, the historic trade route. Over a period of four months, he travelled 40,000 km overland by car, bus, train, ferry, horse and camel, traversing sixteen countries. He began his journey from London’s King’s Cross, where the show is staged (8th April 2021 until 16th June). The exhibition, which is sponsored by the Aga Khan Foundation and presented in partnership with King’s Cross […]
Interview | Elyssa Sykes-Smith: London Live’s ‘Next Big Thing’
The London Magazine Elyssa Sykes-Smith: London Live’s ‘Next Big Thing’ Australian artist Elyssa Sykes-Smith is one of the ten winners…
Fiction | Alysm by Irenosen Okojie
I am walking our dog in the park when the burning sensation infiltrates my throat as though it is new-found land. The burning sensation makes me want to slip into the abandoned baby harness slung over a bench, then run towards a baying that escapes the heat in my blood. The burning sensation has instructions for daylight. In you. Out of you. Beyond you. The burning sensation says the fog expanding in your brain has accomplices. The burning sensation warns […]
Essay | On Being Seen: The Rise of Spoken Word by Joelle Taylor
I am writing this in a dressing room in the Southbank Centre, deep beneath Queen Elizabeth hall. We have gathered along with a full film crew to record our first Out-Spoken Live film which will be broadcast this Sunday. I am part of the team that curates and presents Out-Spoken Live, a poetry and music night resident in the Southbank Purcell Room. We did not begin here. Our move to these prestigious halls is symptomatic of the rise of live poetry and spoken word not only in the UK but globally […]
Fiction | Your Story, My Story by Connie Palmen [Extract]
To most people, we exist only in books, my bride and I. For the past thirty-five years, I’ve had to watch with impotent horror as our real lives were buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth; how our true, complex personalities were replaced by hackneyed characters, reduced to mere images, tailor-made to suit a readership with an appetite for sensationalism. And in all of this, she was the brittle saint […]
Essay | The Year Without Atmosphere
It is two months into your new job when someone mentions, in passing, that your microphone fails to capture the first few words of every sentence you utter, so no one has heard almost anything you’ve said. Until that moment, you believed that you were uninsightful and off-topic and you actually cried, getting off one call, at the feeling that you were a kind of business ghost, haunting meetings without ever provoking a response. You felt that your disappearance might […]
Interview | Caleb Femi on Poor, ‘Bartering’ Poetry and the Mythos of the South London Estate
Architectural philosophy and design were central to my approach in writing the collection. I’ve always been preoccupied with how the built environment affects or shapes the lives of human beings, specifically looking at materials likes concrete, the rigidness of them but also the flexibility or propensity of it to become flexible, depending on who is looking and interacting with it. And in that way, there was something new that needed to be built. I say this […]
Interview | Jorge Coll on Spanish Landscapes at Colnaghi
The London Magazine Jorge Coll on Spanish Landscapes at Colnaghi Colnaghi is recognised as one of the world’s most important…
Interview | Richard Zarzi on Love, Icons and Spiritualism
Richard Zarzi is considered one of the world’s most prominent pop artists working today, having celebrated many icons in his work, including Kate Moss, Cara Delevingne, Chanel and Marilyn Monroe. His work created by projecting images onto a canvas screen, which he further instates with bold light and texture using a mixture of acrylics, resins and diamond dust. The result is a celebration of the icons’ charisma and beauty through an his distinctive signature style […]
Interview | Ben Schott on writing ‘racy’ scenes, the element of surprise and Jeeves and the Leap of Faith
Ben Schott was best known for the hugely popular Schott’s Miscellany series until 2018, when he became a novelist. Described as his homage to the works of P. G. Wodehouse, Schott’s Jeeves and The King of Clubs was published with the blessing of the Wodehouse estate and received rapturous reviews. Schott keeps Bertie and Jeeves in their 1930s setting, but brings a faster pace, detailed endnotes, and a twist of espionage to satisfy the modern reader […]
Interview | Artist Eileen Cooper on ‘Nights at the Circus’, a personal interpretation
The London Magazine ‘Nights at the Circus, a personal interpretation’: Eileen Cooper on her illustration of Angela Carter’s novel The…
Essay | John le Carré: A Biographer’s Struggle
Eager to write le Carré’s biography, unwilling to proceed without his permission and naively hoping for his help, I wrote a brief letter on September 3, 1989 and sent it to him through his agent. I introduced myself, mentioned my five previous biographies, offered to send him copies, gave two references from prominent English authors, asked if he would authorize a life to make sure it would be done by a capable and responsible writer, and suggested a meeting […]
Fiction | Night As It Falls by Jakuta Alikavazovic
The following is extracted from Night As It Falls by Jakuta Alikavazovic, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman and…
Essay | A Modest Proposal by I. Bickerstaff
Dear B.C., I write to you because accountancy is tiring my patience and I have developed some better schemes which will propel me to fame. It is melancholy to consider the bank statements and tax returns of common people while they hang in doubtful circumstances; and, only being trained to contend with positive numbers, I have not enjoyed examining the arrears, debts, and bankruptcies which now litter my desk, from which I can not extract my usual fees or […]
Essay | Broken Inheritance by Richard Aronowitz
If you want to understand history, you need to go out and find its stories. You have to dig them out, unearth them, like archaeologists uncovering traces of earlier civilizations. These stories, the really important ones, are never written down in books. I spent much of one hot summer’s day in Haifa up in a cool, sun- dappled apartment on a quiet residential street at the bottom of the steps leading up to the Shrine of the Báb and its gardens on Mount Carmel […]
Essay | Abdulrazak Gurnah on Afterlives and Colonial Hypocrisy
Samir Jeraj Abdulrazak Gurnah on Afterlives and Colonial Hypocrisy Talking to the BBC as part of their History of the…
Essay | Rediscovering Violette Leduc by Isabelle Marie Flynn
Most bibliophiles will name Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand and Colette among the greats of French literature. Yet they represent the tip of a subversive, transgressive and deeply political iceberg of women writers who have changed the literary and social landscape. As women’s voices grow louder and more diverse in modern publishing, it is vital to recognise that their writing is not new, nor has it just now become important. The words of women are sadly more […]
Fiction | Asphyxia by Violette Leduc
My mother never gave me her hand… She always helped me on and off pavements by pinching my frock or coat very lightly at the spot where the armhole provides a grip. It humiliated me. I felt I was inside the body of an old horse with my carter dragging me along by one ear… One afternoon, as a gleaming carriage sped past, splattering the leaden summer with its reflections, I pushed the hand away right in the middle of the road. She pinched the cloth […]
Fiction | It Was Night by Colin Fleming
My brother’s head sounded like a rabbit’s foot drumming against the baize-coloured carpeting of our room. I had been dreaming about Sarah Claire at our school. She had rabbits. Lots of 4-H stuff, which was why I was mulling signing up. The spittle at the edges of Maxwell’s mouth made him look rabid and he was contorting as if he didn’t have a backbone. I think I said ‘Go, Max, go!’ even though I knew something was well past wrong and death could be here […]
‘Why I’m pleased humour isn’t taken seriously as an art form’ — an interview with author Fabrice Caro
Novel writing and comic strips are two different worlds, hence the difference in signature between Fabcaro and Fabrice Caro, though of course you find a bit of my style in both. I have two distinct approaches to writing. I’d even say that one is the opposite of the other: my comic strips are elliptical, focused on immediate effects and humour in particular. I’m down to the bone, so to speak. My desire to write novels came from a certain frustration with regard to words […]
Review | Grimoire by Robin Robertson
Poet Robin Robertson, whose original tales summon the violent beauty of the Scottish landscape, dedicates his latest collection to ‘the taken: for all those feart of the glamour’, as Grimoire is a collection of the shadow self, for and about those who dwell on peripheries. In a collaboration that calls to mind the Brothers Grimm, the poet’s brother, Tim Robertson, has rendered illustrations that appear on the page like an inkblot test, dark mirrors lending space […]
Review | Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters by Rosanna Warren
Before the Great War a brilliant group of Jewish artists were drawn to Paris. Amedeo Modigliani (called Modi) was born in Italy; Moise Kisling, Jules Pascin, Jacques Lipschitz, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall and Sonia Delaunay came from Eastern Europe. The Jewish painter and poet Max Jacob (1876-1944), born in Quimper, Brittany, was the only Frenchman connected to this group […]
Review | The Loneliness of the Soul at The Royal Academy of Arts
I have written about Tracey Emin many times and have always felt that her self-absorption and solipsism undermined her art. So I was sceptical as I got myself along – mask-protected – for my socially distanced visit to the Royal Academy to see The Loneliness of the Soul, a show in which she has double billing with Edvard Munch. What hubris, I thought! She’s bound to be dwarfed by the master of angst. To be the junior partner. The also-ran. This, after all, is the […]
Interview | Seán Hewitt on Tongues of Fire, the Androgynous Lyric and ‘Pre-elegy’
I’m not actually a fan of Wordsworth. Of all the grand Romantic poets, I love John Clare. What I balk at with Wordsworth might be something that I’m concerned about in my own writing. We do this a lot. I say I don’t like people that are perhaps similar to me. Or I recognise a tendency in myself for the Wordsworthian, which is something I try to hold back on. Perhaps when I read Wordsworth it makes me cringe because I recognise my own tendencies to want […]
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