• This week, I found myself sitting for hours in a packed public hospital waiting room. The queue barely moved. Plastic chairs scraped on the floor, babies cried somewhere in the distance, and every few minutes someone would sigh loudly and ask, “Who’s the last one in the line?” It was the kind of scene that…

    Read more →

  • American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has been named the winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize – the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for writers aged 39 and under – for her debut poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name. Selected unanimously by this year’s judging panel, the collection traces the turbulent, often…

    Read more →

  • There is a quiet moment that comes before any serious act of writing. It is not the moment of inspiration, as it is often described. Not a sudden idea or a clear sentence forming fully in the mind. It is something slower, less certain. A kind of hesitation. The recognition that there is something you…

    Read more →

  • Books that see us

    There is a particular kind of reading experience that is difficult to explain without sounding as though something improbable has occurred. You are reading as you always do, moving through sentences, following an argument, inhabiting a voice, and then something shifts. A line stops you. Not because it is especially beautiful, or clever, or even…

    Read more →

  • What must we think when a president, during a press conference, can hone in on a journalist doing her job and say, “she’s a horror show”, and the moment simply passes? Not merely passes politically, but morally. No visible discomfort from those around him. No meaningful defence of the journalist’s dignity. No national conversation about…

    Read more →