When you are a child born in one place and raised in another, ‘home’ is complicated. Even more so, when ‘home’ is a series of couches, hotel rooms, borrowed apartments, and rented houses. ‘Home’ is something that belongs to your mother, gifted to you through pictures and stories, the folklore of her youth. It is Read More
JOHN MITCHINSON is a writer and publisher and the co-founder of Unbound, the award-winning crowdfunding platform for books. He helped to create the BBC TV show QI and co-wrote the best-selling series of QI books. As a publisher, he worked in senior positions at Harvill, Orion and Cassell. Before that he was Waterstone’s first marketing director. He is co-host of Read More
“in pre-capitalist Europe women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.” Silvia Federici mothering sunday mothered nothing Read More
Stranger he sits on the very edge of the bench legs crossed hands on his knees fingers strongly knitted together his whole body bends to the front it seems as he was just about to get up and go but forgot about it his hair is grey almost white his skin is tired nose off-colour Read More
(UK, 2018) 16 – 29 March, DCA Those aware of Lynne Ramsay’s previous work will know the kind of anticipation a new film of hers can bring. A mixture of joy from the artistic quality of her track record and dread of the resulting mental state. 2018’s You Were Never Really Here is no different, Read More
With every journey comes a risk of falling into melancholy – a passing landscape can spark a memory of a person, home, a string of events. These brief glimpses are at the heart of Andrew Taylor’s second poetry collection, March. The collection begins with “The Welsh Hills”: it starts with a bell then the harmonium Read More
At the 2017 Dundee Literary Festival’s event for debut novelists, Ever Dundas is joined on stage by Gillian Best and Helen McClory. Dundas reads first, introducing her book Goblin. An hour later, she sits across from me in a small cafe area below the hall she has spoken in. There is a shift between the Read More
Storm Brian is rampaging across Ireland.* Works about bad weather, I test myself: Bad Weather Collage, Naomi Vona.¹ A black and white photograph of a man in a suit. There is a blue paper cloud above his head and the head itself is obscured by strips of paper in white, pink and yellow. From the Read More
My first attempt was on the 4th of February 2017. We arrived at the bothy and settled onto the wooden slats for the night in a hut that sleeps ten. I think there were fifteen of us. The next morning’s cold crept into our sleeping bags, and the bustle of rucksack-packing and lunch-making sprung life Read More
Gillian Clarke is a writer with a deep sense of attachment. Born in Cardiff in 1937 and living now in Ceredigion, Clarke held the position of National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. Her newest collection of poetry continues this relationship, but also broadens it: the landscape and the culture of Wales is a Read More