‘Writing about other people doesn’t have to be an exercise of power or a theft of identity.’
‘This is the perennial anxiety – that at any moment, day or night, you might be snatched and shackled and tried and sent back.’
‘I am lying in the foetal position on a beach in the east of England.’
’In the spring of 2015, at my desk in London, I received an email from a DJ/producer in Detroit.’
‘We need a new genre of travel writing, gleaned from the stories refugees and migrants.’
‘The first time I ever visited a place I’d read about in a travel book was when my family took a holiday in Hong Kong in 1993.’
‘A man will only return to his birthplace in the countryside when he is dead. This is our reality.’
‘I grew up in the semi-tropical south, dotted by wet paddy fields, but I always wanted to go to the north.’
‘But I still get homesick, that vast and deep pit in the stomach, every time I go away.’
‘Travel writing of most kinds, not just the humorous, has the history of colonialism perched on its shoulder.’
‘In my imagination I have been to many villages and cities in the world.’
‘The death of travel – and of the travel book – has been predicted for almost a century.’
‘The best writers rose to the challenge by seeking not originality of destination, but originality of form.’
‘I wanted to see a human’s expression after returning from space.’
‘Malachi is brushing her hair, long, dark brown and with russet glints. She likes it, as he can tell from her smile in the mirror.’
‘Apartheid had marked him, as it has marked all of us, in different ways. It made me hyper-aware of colour.’
‘The writer on place has to go further inward, into the realm of silence and nuance and personal enquiry.’
‘I have come to believe that we are all migrants, that the experience of migration unites all human beings.’
‘What kinds of writing aren’t travel writing?’
‘This is a literature of checkpoints and fences, and the improvised gaps through which desperate people pass.’
‘These photographs capture that fatal boredom in the face of this slow-motion catastrophe.’
‘I didn’t have the language for why I could not be a tourist in the same way as my white counterparts.’
‘So tight he whispered / from beyond the haze, thrusting until she was no longer a part of me.’
‘Even in its subtler forms, the act of looking is an act of self-regard.’
‘Do I have the heart to drink a glass of cool Coke?’
‘You don’t plunge into growing up; it happens in spite of you.’
‘If you laugh and tell me I am only speaking metaphorically, I will reply: what other way do you expect me to speak?’
A story of ageing infidelity: ‘He would seek to remember and she would seek to remember – each succeeding a little differently from the other.’
‘You can’t control your face / The Empire has over-reached / Expressions // Have become flags’
‘I am exploring how the Korean War lives and breathes in contemporary Korean society.’ Photographs from Korea by Noh Suntag.
Trapped in a revolving restaurant during an American revolution, Shel VanRybroek turns to tin-foil sculpture.
A collection of revolutionary writings and manifestos from Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Nelson Mandela, James Baldwin and Occupy Wall Street
John Connell writes of a trial and a murder during the Irish War of Independence.
‘The push and pull of identity politics is the child of slavery and empire.’ Ben Rawlence on empire and the construction of white identity.
‘The Armadillo Man is watching her. She gives him a good show – the best she has to offer.’
Peter Pomerantsev takes us on a tour of the lewd, crude language of modern politics – from Trump to Putin to Duterte, Milo Yianopoulos, Boris Johnson and more.
